Lyrical Strains
Liberalism and Women's Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America
By Elissa Zellinger
272 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 10 halftones, notes, bibl., index
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-5981-7
Published: November 2020 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-5980-0
Published: November 2020 -
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-5982-4
Published: October 2020 -
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-5890-0
Published: October 2020
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About the Author
Elissa Zellinger is assistant professor of English at Texas Tech University.
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Reviews
"Zellinger's fresh methodology will be an important addition to the study of poetry and to the many ongoing debates about the lyric in critical circles. . . . For both readers and writers of contemporary poetry, Zellinger's work expands and refreshes our understanding of the lyric and of the lineage of women writers."âWomen's Review of Books
"Highly recommended...Zellinger traces the contributions of four women authors in the last two centuries: Elizabeth Oakes Smith and Ellen Watkins Harper, both identified as "traditional" writers; Native author E. Pauline Johnson; and the quixotic Edna St. Vincent Millay. These authors have been excluded when others, for example, Christina Rossetti, Charlotte BrontĂ«, and Emily Dickinson, have been put in the limelight."âCHOICE
âZellinger is an excellent reader of poems. . . . Many readers will be delighted with Zellingerâs emphasis on the concept of the Poetess as central to womenâs poetry for over a century.ââTulsa Studies in Womenâs Literature
â[Zellinger] bracingly shows how woman poets who did not have political claims to liberal subjectivity turned tactically to the idea of lyric as the consummate poetic expression of subjectivity . . . [and] helps us to hear them with new clarity.ââAmerican Literary History
âElissa Zellingerâs analysis of how nineteenth-century American lyric poems work is a fresh and radical intervention in a field that has been grappling with these questions for nearly two decades. By linking the history of the creation of the liberal self to womenâs lyric production, Zellinger boldly intervenes in a variety of arguments about genre and gender in ways that will continue to shape the field.ââAlexandra Socarides, University of Missouri
âLyrical Strains makes an important intervention into debates over the existence and significance of lyric poetry in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, arguing that âstrainsâ of the lyric in a wide variety of womenâs poetry contributed to a critique of the availability of liberal selfhood to those marked by gender and race. Elissa Zellinger is to be commended for the diversity of authors and texts she brings together here, as well as for her work at the intersection of literary studies and political philosophy.ââJennifer Putzi, The College of William & Mary