From the contents: Virginia BLAIN: Be these his daughters?: Caroline Bowles Southey, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and disruption in a patriarchal poetics of women's autobiography. - Meg TASKER: 'Aurora Leigh': Elizabeth Barrett Browning's novel approach to the woman poet. - E. WARWICK SLINN: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the problem of female agency. - Debra FRIED: In Daisy's lane: variants and personification in Emily Dickinson.

Silence, gender, and the sonnet revival -- Breaking "the silent Sabbath of the grave" : romantic women's sonnets and the "mute arbitress" of grief -- "In silence like to death" : Elizabeth Barrett's sonnet turn -- Sing again : Christina Rossetti and the music of silence -- "Silence, 'tis more cruel than the grave!" : Isabella Southern and the turn to the twentieth century -- Women's renunciation of the sonnet form.

In this book, Elissa Zellinger analyzes both political philosophy and poetic theory in order to chronicle the consolidation of the modern lyric and the liberal subject across the long nineteenth century. In the nineteenth-century United States, both liberalism and lyric sought self-definition by practicing techniques of exclusion. Liberalism was a political philosophy whose supposed universals were limited to white men and created by omitting women, the enslaved, and Native peoples. The conventions of poetic reception only redoubled the sense that liberal selfhood defined its boundaries by refusing raced and gendered others. Yet Zellinger argues that it is precisely the poetics of the excluded that offer insights into the dynamic processes that came to form the modern liberal and lyric subjects. She examines poets—Frances Sargent Osgood, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E. Pauline Johnson—whose work uses lyric practices to contest the very assumptions about selfhood responsible for denying them the political and social freedoms enjoyed by full liberal subjects. In its consideration of politics and poetics, this project offers a new approach to genre and gender that will help shape the field of nineteenth-century American literary studies.

A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry is the first book to construct a coherent history of the field and focus entirely on women's poetry of the period. With contributions from some of the most prominent scholars of nineteenth-century American literature, it explores a wide variety of authors, texts, and methodological approaches. Organized into three chronological sections, the essays examine multiple genres of poetry, consider poems circulated in various manuscript and print venues, and propose alternative ways of narrating literary history. From these essays, a rich story emerges about a diverse poetics that was once immensely popular but has since been forgotten. This History confirms that the field has advanced far beyond the recovery of select individual poets. It will be an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and critics of both the literature and the history of this era.

The first collection to make a comprehensive study of nineteenth-century women's poetry from late Romantic to late Victorian 'new woman' writers. Eighteen essays consider the gendered codes and genres developed by sophisticated poets. The feminine subject and marketing, a woman's tradition, lesbian desire, war, race, colonial experience, religion and science are themes of the collection, featuring, as well as the familiar Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, other poets such as 'L.E.L.', Felicia Hemans, Amy Levy and Augusta Webster.

Arguing that the end of the eighteenth-century witnessed the emergence of an important female poetic tradition, Claire Knowles analyzes the poetry of several key women writing between 1780 and 1860. Knowles provides important context by demonstrating the influence of the Della Cruscans in exposing the constructed and performative nature of the trope of sensibility, a revelation that was met with critical hostility by a literary culture that valorised sincerity. This sets the stage for Charlotte Smith, who pioneers an autobiographical approach to poetic production that places increased emphasis on the connection between the poet's physical body and her body of work. Knowles shows the poets Susan Evance, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning advancing Smith's poetic strategy as they seek to elicit a powerful sympathetic response from readers by highlighting a connection between their actual suffering and the production of poetry. From this environment, a specific tradition in female poetry arises that is identifiable in the work of twentieth-century writers like Sylvia Plath and continues to pertain today. Alongside this new understanding of poetic tradition, Knowles provides an innovative account of the central role of women writers to an emergent late eighteenth-century mass literary culture and traces a crucial discursive shift that takes place in poetic production during this period. She argues that the movement away from the passionate discourse of sensibility in the late eighteenth century to the more contained rhetoric of sentimentality in the early nineteenth had an enormous effect, not only on female poets but also on British literary culture as a whole.