Troubling the Lineage: Women, Innovation, and the American Long Poem in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

• Other Authors: Newcomer, Caitlin Elizabeth (authoraut)
• Format: Others
• Language: English; English
• Published: Florida State University
• Subjects: English literature; English language
• Online Access: http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_migr_etd-8858

Troubling the Lineage addresses two persistent gaps in scholarship pertaining to the long poem in the twentieth century: the omission of works by women and the pervasive characterization of the long poem as a "masculine" form. As a result, the complex interplay between gender and genre at the heart of the long poem has been obscured, and the powerful female-authored precedents that shape contemporary poetic texts have been overlooked. To this end, this study provides new critical vocabularies that give us the tools to re-conceptualize the way we think about women poets' negotiation of the long poem and its modernist legacy. In contrast to canonical models of poetic affiliation, this study places modernist and contemporary women poets--including Gertrude Stein, H.D., Mina Loy, Bernadette Mayer, Claudia Rankine, Harryette Mullen, and Susan Howe--in conversation with one another, arguing that such conversations constitute an unfinished project of twentieth century literary history. In a series of chapters that bring these poets together, I demonstrate that contemporary women poets often turn to the overlooked long poems of female modernism and rework, critique, and extend those projects for a host of fascinating reasons. This conversation constitutes a crucial chapter that has gone missing from the stories we tell about the long poem and the evolution of poetry by women, especially as manifested within a tradition of innovative feminist poetics. In order to rethink how the long poem has been gendered by and beyond our current critical narratives, I also argue that the social pressures brought about by the cultural marginality of these female poets are manifested at the level of genre. For example, my first chapter focuses on three poems--Mina Loy's Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923-25), Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day (1978), and Claudia Rankine's Plot (2001)--that use "private" psychological and physical experiences as the scaffold on which the long poem is built. By doing so, these poets render the form of the long poem temporarily "female" and trouble generic distinctions by grafting the traditionally public form of the long poem onto the "unspeakable" aspects of women's embodied experience. Ultimately, then, this project argues for three new, interconnected narratives: a revision of the relation between genre and gender in the long poem, a re-valuing of modernist women poets' contributions to the twentieth century long poem, and a reframing of later women poets' relationship to the legacy of literary modernism and its female practitioners. === A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. === Spring Semester, 2014. === March 26, 2014. === Includes bibliographical references. === Andrew Epstein, Professor Directing Dissertation; Aimee Boutin, University Representative; Barry Faulk, Committee Member; Timothy Parrish, Committee Member.