1st Edition
Poetry Off the Page Twentieth-Century British Women Poets in Performance
By Laura Severin
Copyright 2004
128 Pages
by
Routledge
128 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
This study examines the performed poetry of Charlotte Mew, Anna Wickham, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Liz Lochhead, and Jackie Kay as an alternative radical tradition of British poetry, developed to convey women's experience. Through a historical treatment in which the poets are discussed in pairs, the chapters trace how these six women used a performative poetry to deal with difficulties... Read more
Contents: Introduction; Embodiments of lust: the performances of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham; Acting 'out': the performances of Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith; Shapeshifting: the performances of Liz Lochhead and Jackie Kay; Ways forward: Jackie Kay and poetry on television; Works cited; Index.
Biography
Laura Severin is Associate Professor of English at the North Carolina State University, USA.
'With great intellectual force and velocity, Laura Severin pierces the obscurity in which twentieth-century British women poets have languished and liberates them from their status as "minor" writers. . . . No study before hers has paid so much attention, and done this to such good effect, to the performative aspects of work by poets such as Charlotte Mew, Edith Sitwell, or Stevie Smith. The chapter on Stevie Smith, in particular, is a triumph.' Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies, University of Delaware '... Severin laudably retrieves and identifies the ways in which theatricality has served women's creativity in drama and poetry, advocating a new context of critique that addresses 'the unexamined liminal zone' between postcoloniality and Britishness where women's work is still ostensibly consigned to the critical periphery.' Wasafiri
