| Times of Change; Six Nineteenth-Century Poets Who Expanded Women's Literature is a study of six nineteenth-century women poets, L.E.L., Alice Meynell, Elizabeth Hands, Elizabeth Moody, Phoebe Cary, and Frances Osgood, who expanded the sphere of women's literature with their work, bringing about change in later generations. Each woman used specific poetic techniques to criticize or expand the expectations for women poets in her era. This work is influenced by Angela Leighton, Anne K. Mellor, Eileen Gillooly, and it uses formalism and new historicism as its critical foundation. In the first chapter, close readings show that L.E.L. criticized the mask she wore as a female "poetess" and Meynell used the traditional motherhood poetic form to write modern, untraditional motherhood poetry. Elizabeth Hands criticized the upper-classes in her satires, while using common language that later became a hallmark of the Romantic Movement, and Elizabeth Moody criticized the idea of two separate spheres in her poems. Phoebe Cary and Frances Osgood do similar work in nineteenth-century America. Cary wrote parodies that attacked overly-sentimental verse and placed the male and female traditions in dialogue with one another, and Osgood also criticized the sentimental tradition, but in works that look, on the surface, to be sentimental themselves. This work also traces their critical reception---mainly, how these poets were forgotten and rediscovered---in order to show some of the common reasons, such as an attachment to a prominent literary figure, for overlooking poets such as these. Each of these poets influenced others, and slowly, as the course of women's poetry changed in the ways they suggested through their works, they served as forerunners to later-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century poetry. |
