Employing current work in gender studies, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism and focusing on Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich, the author delineates an alternative tradition of American women poets, what Diehl calls the American Counter-Sublime. "This is the best book on American women poets I have yet seen." American Literature. "... sophisticated and eloquently argued analysis of a female counter-sublime..." Sandra Gilbert. "... strong readings of Dickinson and Moore and... a vital polemic on behalf of feminist criticism." Harold Bloom. "This brilliant re-evaluation of major American women poets will be indispensable reading... A stunning and a magisterial achievement." Susan Gubar. "... a powerful thesis... a book that is as rich as it is dense in meaning." The Women's Review of Books.

Signets brings together the best essays of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis have gathered the most influential and generative studies of H. D.'s work and complemented them with photobiographical, chronological, and bibliographical portraits unique to this volume. The essays in Signets span H. D.'s career from the origins of Imagism to late modernism, from the early poems of Sea Garden to the novel HER and the epic poems Trilogy and Helen in Egypt. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Diana Collecott, Robert Duncan, Albert Gelpi, Eileen Gregory, Susan Gubar, Barbara Guest, Elizabeth A. Hirsch, Deborah Kelly Kloepfer, Cassandar Laity, Adalaide Morris, Alicia Ostriker, Cyrena N. Pondrom, Perdita Schaffner, and Louis H. Silverstein. Signets is an essential resource for those interested in H. D., modernism, and feminist criticism and writing.

American poetics has been radicalized in recent years by revisionist theories which replay and ground poets against their Romantic precursors. Beginning with the sublime politics of Emerson and ending with women poets who renounce the authority of gender, The American Sublime represents the various modes of recent critical thinking. This collection of essays takes up the mapping of the American sublime begun by Harold Bloo. Prefaced by an introduction that traces the sublime from its origins in Longinus through Kant, Freud and Bloom, the essays focus on central American poetic scenes. These include the transparency of Emerson's vision of the sublime, Whitman's passage to India, Dickinson's corridors of the soul, and Stevens' contemplation of death in the auroras.

American poetics has been radicalized in recent years by revisionist theories which replay and ground poets against their Romantic precursors. Beginning with the sublime politics of Emerson and ending with women poets who renounce the authority of gender, The American Sublime represents the various modes of recent critical thinking. This collection of essays takes up the mapping of the American sublime begun by Harold Bloo. Prefaced by an introduction that traces the sublime from its origins in Longinus through Kant, Freud and Bloom, the essays focus on central American poetic scenes. These include the transparency of Emerson's vision of the sublime, Whitman's passage to India, Dickinson's corridors of the soul, and Stevens' contemplation of death in the auroras.

Tracing ideas of the sublime in American literature from Puritan writings to the postmodern epoch, Rob Wilson demonstrates that the North American landscape has been the ground for political as well as aesthetic transport. He takes a distinctly historical approach and explores the ways in which experiences of the American landscape instill desire for other kinds of vastness: self-expansion, national expansion, and American political power. As Wallace Stevens put it, the American will takes "dominion everywhere." Wilson sets the stage for his "genealogy" with a discussion of the classical notion of the sublime (taken primarily from Longinus) and the ways that notion was pragmatically transformed by its American setting and appropriated by American poets. He follows this transformation in successive chapters on the Puritans (Bradstreet) through the Naturalists (Livingston and Bryant), from the epitome of the American sublime (Whitman) to the greatest of the modernists (Stevens) and its present-day incarnations (Ashbery and others). Writing today under the sign of Hiroshima, contemporary writers must struggle with the concept of the sublime within a context of spiralling technologies and nuclear force that calls into question the long-standing American sacralization of power. Throughout American Sublime, Wilson engages in an original theoretical inquiry into "the sublime" as term, topic, complex, and controversial idea in literary and critical history. Furthermore, he undertakes his historical study from an avowedly postmodern perspective, one that draws on and extends the work of Jameson, Lyotard, Foucault, Lentricchia, Harold Bloom, and others.

This study examines the theoretical underpinnings of Robert Duncan’s poetry and poetics. The author’s overriding concern is Duncan’s understanding of excess in relation to poetry and the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead, William James, and John Dewey.

Scheming Women charts a trajectory of American female poetic speakers from within a heterosexual lyric framework to bisexual and lesbian subjects outside that pervasive frame. In close readings of Dickinson, Moore, H.D., and Rich, the author makes a new argument about the division that permeates their poetic speaking subjects. Postulating a revolutionary female subject, she extends Julia Kristeva's theory of poetic language through an intertextual approach, and shows that these relatively advantaged female poets destructure the very poetic power they are able to assert. Hogue concludes that in not reproducing positions of dominance and privilege indicative of larger cultural trends, these key poets exemplify important alternatives to class, race, and gender hierarchies—persuasively demonstrating the promise of what she terms an ethical feminist poetic practice.