A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry

A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry offers a detailed evaluative documentary record of the publications, activities and achievements of a lively but undervalued literary community. Part literary history, part critical analysis, this comprehensive survey is organised into three historical periods (1900–1945, 1945–1980 and 1980–2000), each part introduced by a comprehensive overview in which the emerging names are mapped against cultural, literary and poetic events and trends. Individual essays reflect and stimulate continuing debates about the nature of women\'s poetry and cover a range of canonical and lesser-known, but significant, poets. They offer new critical approaches to reading poems that engage with, for example, war, domesticity, modernism, linguistic innovation, place, the dramatic monologue, postmodernism and the lyric. A chronology and detailed bibliography of primary and secondary sources covering over 200 writers make this an invaluable reference source for scholars and students of British poetry and women’s writing.

• Full coverage of British women’s poetry across the century • Re-evaluates the canon of women’s writing and explores its contexts • Includes an invaluable chronology and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources covering over 200 writers

Chronology; Introduction ; Part I. 1900–45: Overview; 1. Lyrical androgyny: Alice Meynell, Frances Cornford, Vita Sackville-West and Elizabeth Daryush; 2. A public voice: war, class and women\'s rights; 3. Modernism, memory and masking: Mina Loy and Edith Sitwell; 4. ‘I will put myself, and everything I see, upon the page’: Charlotte Mew, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Anna Wickham and the dramatic monologue; Part II. 1945–1980: Overview; 5. Stevie Smith; 6. The post-war generation and the paradox of home; 7. The poetry of consciousness-raising; 8. Disruptive lyrics: Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Wendy Mulford and Denise Riley; Part III. 1980–2000: Overview; 9. ‘These parts’: identity and place; 10. Dialogic politics in Carol Ann Duffy and others; 11. Postmodern transformations: science and myth; 12. The renovated lyric: from Eavan Boland and Carol Rumens to Jackie Kay and the next generation.