Embodying Utopia in 1935: Poetry and the Feminized Nation

Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies, 2019

My paper assesses the effects of periodization on feminist representations of utopias. The first text acknowledged is Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, followed by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, and concluding with Angela Carter’s collection of short stories entitled The Bloody Chamber. The paper demonstrates how one can mark the different movements within feminism throughout history as the nature of the utopian genre is that it reflects the desires of individuals within contemporary society. The utopia as a genre is becoming an increasingly diverse literary segment and one which can be described as under construction. We are moving towards new terms such as ‘ustopia’ which acknowledges that one’s utopia can be another’s dystopia. The utopian genre fuels and supports critical and satirical writing and so the method of periodization and assessing its lineage leads to illuminating details on historical movements which in this case is feminism.

Women's Studies, 2018

This essay proposes a paradigm shift in the way we analyze late-nineteenth century women's poetry. The ongoing recovery of late-Victorian women poets has both enabled and invigorated the study of women's poetry, and to accommodate and understand these new voices, scholars have offered two major conceptual categories: " female aesthetes " and " new woman poets. " These models have proved useful but the more scholars have worked with them, the more they have seen the need for additional or alternate descriptive categories. Addressing periodization and arguing that it is especially problematic in regard to late-century women poets, this essay proposes a new period category—turn of the century women's poetry—wedded to a new formalist approach. This reconceptualization has multiple benefits: an alternative for theorizing women's poetry that does not depend on the domestic/poetess model; a non-deterministic period category that does not smooth over contradictions and oppositions; a frame for the recovered voices of women poets that accommodates their differences while accounting for their coherence; and a vision that looks both to the past and toward the future for a clearer picture of women's poetic production.(1) In order to establish the value of looking toward the Edwardian era when interpreting the social and institutional forms represented in turn of the century women's poetry, the essay outlines some post-1900 forms and contexts that both emerge from and provide critical frames of reference for poems of the earlier period. The essay offers readings of poems by Dollie Radford and Edith Nesbit to illustrate the ways in which current critical categories fail many women's poems, and closes with a discussion of works by Alice Meynell, May Kendall, and A. Mary F. Robinson that demonstrate the value of looking both forward and back when interpreting turn of the century women's poetry.

Routledge eBooks, 2014

Feminism, a belief in the pursuit of women's political, cultural, and economic equality, is one of history's most complex and essential movements. From Ancient Greece to the fight for women's suffrage to the #MeToo movement, feminism has formed a fascinating history. To better understand this movement, historians have divided them into three "waves." In this research paper, I will discuss how first-wave feminism dealt with property rights and suffrage; second-wave feminism focused on equality and anti-discrimination, and third-wave feminism was a response or backlash against the second-wave, which they believed, privileged white women. By selecting examples from several important feminist poets, this review paper discusses how they contributed to these waves and how they affected the movements that followed.

Modern Philology, 2008

American Literary Scholarship, 2002