In Plain Sight explores how the poetry of nineteenth-century American women that was once so visible within American culture could have, with the exception of that by Emily Dickinson, so thoroughly disappeared from literary history. By investigating erasure not merely as something that was done to these women but as the result of the conventions that once made the circulation of their poetry possible in the first place, this book offers the first book-length analysis of the conventions of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry. In doing so, In Plain Sight makes visible a whole field of poetry that has been long forgotten. In order to recover this field instead of its individual women poets, each of the chapters focuses on a specific convention and its participation in the construction of literary history. Taken together they tell the complicated story of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, tracing the spaces within literary culture where it lived and thrived, the spaces from which its authors were always in the process of vanishing. By inhabiting those spaces, we can see both the conventions that were taken up with such gusto that they made the woman poet a familiar figure to nineteenth-century readers and the specter of obscurity and unreadability that are embedded within them. By reclaiming these conventions as a constitutive part of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, this book asks readers to take seriously the work these women produced and the role their work might play in remapping American literary history.
A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry is the first book to construct a coherent history of the field and focus entirely on women's poetry of the period. With contributions from some of the most prominent scholars of nineteenth-century American literature, it explores a wide variety of authors, texts, and methodological approaches. Organized into three chronological sections, the essays examine multiple genres of poetry, consider poems circulated in various manuscript and print venues, and propose alternative ways of narrating literary history. From these essays, a rich story emerges about a diverse poetics that was once immensely popular but has since been forgotten. This History confirms that the field has advanced far beyond the recovery of select individual poets. It will be an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and critics of both the literature and the history of this era.
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