Synopses & Reviews
In this book, Rachel Blau DuPlessis shows how, through poetic language, modernist writers represented the debates around such social issues of modernity as suffrage, sexuality, manhood, and African-American and Jewish subjectivities. DuPlessis engages with the work of such canonical poets as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and H. D., as well as Mina Loy, Countee Cullen, Alfred Kreymborg and Langston Hughes, writers still marginalized by existing constructions of modernism.
Review
"This book's focus stays strongly on target throughout, opening up ways of reading this demanding poetry. I recommend it highly." American Literature"I recommend DuPlessis's book for the wonderful light it shines on how some poets grappled, in the very texture of their writing, with some of the central political issues of Modernism." Rain Taxi"the book is excitingly clear in its social investments, and offers a means for responsibilty bodying forth those investments in original dense, richly textured, and highly plausible readings." Modernism/Modernity 11/01
About the Author
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is Professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Writing Beyond the Ending (1985), H.D.: The Career of that Struggle (1986), The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (1990), she is also editor of The Selected Letters of George Oppen (1990), and co-editor of both The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (1999) and The Feminist Memoir Project (1998). She is also a widely published poet.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements; 1. Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetries; 2. 'Corpses of Poesy': modern poets consider dome gender ideologies of lyric; 3. 'Seismic Orgasm': sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics; 4. 'HOO, HOO, HOO': some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness; 5. 'Darken your speech': racialized cultural work in black and white poets; 'wondering Jews': melting pots and mongrel thoughts; 6. Bibliography.