Synopses & Reviews
A new reading of Elizabeth Bishop's work ranging across archival, historical and theoretical materials
Linda Anderson explores Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, from her early days at Vassar College to her last great poems in Geography III and the later uncollected poems. Drawing generously on Bishop's notebooks and letters, the book situates Bishop both in her historical and cultural context and in terms of her own writing process, where the years between beginning a poem and completing it, for which Bishop is legendary, are seen as a necessary part of their composition. The book begins by offering a new reading of Bishop's relationship with Marianne Moore and with modernism. Through her journeys to Europe Bishop, it is also argued, learned a great deal from visual artists and from surrealism. However the book also follows the way Bishop came back to memories of her childhood, developing ideas about narrative, in order to explore time, both the losses it demands and the connections it makes possible. The lines of connections are both those between Bishop and her contemporaries and her context and those she inscribed through her own work, suggesting how her poems incorporate a process of arrival and create new possibilities of meaning.
Synopsis
Linda Anderson explores the poetry of twentieth-century US author, Elizabeth Bishop, from her early days at Vassar College to her last great poems in Geography III and the later uncollected poems.
About the Author
Linda Anderson is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at Newcastle University where she is also Director of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts. She is the author of Autobiography (2002; 2nd edition, 2010), Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, 1997) and has edited Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery (2002) with Jo Shapcott.. Her poetry pamphlet, Greenhouse is published with Mariscat in 2013.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; List of Figures; Introduction; 1. Paper Replicas; 2. A Window Into Europe; 3. The Labyrinth of Temporality; 4. The Journey of Lines; Bibliography.