Extending the Line: Early Twentieth Century American Women's Sonnets

dc.contributor.advisorPeppis, Paul
dc.contributor.authorWakefield, Eleanor
dc.date.accessioned2017-09-06T21:43:34Z
dc.date.available2017-09-06T21:43:34Z
dc.date.issued2017-09-06
dc.description.abstractThis dissertation rereads sonnets by three crucial but misunderstood early twentieth-century women poets at the intersection of the study of American literary history and scholarship of the sonnet as a genre, exposing and correcting a problematic loss of nuance in both narratives. Genre scholarship of the sonnet rarely extends into the twentieth century, while early twentieth-century studies tend to focus on nontraditional poem types. But in fact, as I show, formal poetry, the sonnet in particular, engaged deeply with the contemporary social issues of the period, and proved especially useful for women writers to consider the ways their identities as women and poets functioned in a world that was changing rapidly. Using the sonnet’s dialectical form, which creates tension with an internal turn, and which engages inherently with its own history, these women writers demonstrated the enduring power of the sonnet as well as their own positions as women and poets. Tying together genre and period scholarship, my dissertation corrects misreadings of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sarah Teasdale, and Helene Johnson; of the period we often refer to as “modernism”; and of the sonnet form.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1794/22651
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.publisherUniversity of Oregon
dc.rightsAll Rights Reserved.
dc.subjectAmericanen_US
dc.subjectModernismen_US
dc.subjectPoeticsen_US
dc.subjectPoetryen_US
dc.subjectSonneten_US
dc.subjectWomenen_US
dc.titleExtending the Line: Early Twentieth Century American Women's Sonnets
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
thesis.degree.disciplineDepartment of English
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Oregon
thesis.degree.leveldoctoral
thesis.degree.namePh.D.

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