New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry: Unsettling the Literary Tradition

Dear Colleagues,

Since the scholarly recovery work of the 1990s, nineteenth-century American women’s poetry has emerged as a major field. Since the publication of many outstanding anthologies by Paula Bennett, Janet Grey, Karen Kilcup and Cheryl Walker, among others, scholars have continued to develop new critical interpretations of these understudied poets. From the abolitionist poems of Frances Harper to the Native American activism of Lydia Sigourney and from the dramatic verse of Adah Isaacs Menken to the reclaiming of Jewish history by Emma Lazarus, among others, nineteenth-century American women poets have written formally innovative, socially relevant and historically informed poems. This Issue invites new theoretically informed readings of nineteenth-century American women poets reflecting on contemporary critical debates and issues relevant to today’s readers.

Building on past archival work and prior scholarship, these essays are invited to put nineteenth-century American female poets in conversation with major poets, like Emily Dickinson, or to discuss figures not widely known but deserving of attention. Essays placing the poems in conversation with any current, compelling discussions within literary studies, including race, gender, class, sexuality and disability studies, are welcome. This Special Issue seeks to highlight the continuing importance of the field of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry in teaching and research.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The role of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry in canon formation and the literary tradition;
• Teaching and writing about nineteenth-century American women poets;
• Formal innovation and techniques in women’s poetry;
• Historical materialism, Marxism and economic factors that shape their poems;
• Comparative studies of nineteenth-century female poets (North/South, urban/rural, American/Transnational or Transatlantic);
• Historical poetics and the relation between material life and social activism;
• Ecocriticism and ecological approaches;
• Gender, sexuality and identity;
• Race, identity and/or disability in poems.

Prof. Dr. Elizabeth A Petrino
Guest Editor

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• nineteenth-century American women’s poetry
• women’s writing
• materialist approaches
• historical poetics
• formalism
• gender
• literary tradition and canon formation
• social activism
• feminism