| Summary: | The Journey of the Poetess: Writing DLD. 's Autobiography is a Creative Writing thesis comprising two related but discrete components: a book-length cycle of poems entitled An Elastic State of Mind: DLD. 's Autobiography in Poems, and a two-part exegesis of the imaginative biographer/poet's creative process. An Elastic State of Mind is a collection of poems written in the voice of the historical 19th century teacher, writer and prison reformer Dorothea Lynde Dix. Part one of the exegesis looks specifically at the cultural and historical distinctions taken into account" when writing lyric poems in the voice of the Victorian New England "spinster". D.L.D.'s contemporary conceptual relationships among gender, language, madness and poetry are explored. Part two discusses associative leaps in Aristotelian mimeses as vehicles for transformative literature, the tension between the chronological narrative and non-linear experience as a hyperrealist literary technique, the subversion and adaptation of traditional poetic forms, and the appropriateness of poetry as a biographer's form of expression.
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