Poetesses at the grave: Transnational circulation of women's memorial verse in nineteenth-century England, Germany and America (Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Luise von Ploennies)

This dissertation treats the poetess as a generic figure that circulates through women's poetry in nineteenth-century England, Germany, and America. In memorial verse written by and for women poets, the poetess is presented in a pose of mourning. Standing at the grave, she stages a scene of elegiac reading and writing repeated by many other poetesses. The dissertation argues that the repetition of this seemingly static pose makes the poetess a mobile sign for the exchange of sympathies across national boundaries.; After surveying recent criticism on the British poetess, Chapter 1 develops a comparative and transnational perspective by tracing English, French, German, and American importations of this figure (in the guise of the foreign Sappho and Corinne). Chapter 2 reads a cycle of memorial poems by Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, focusing in particular on various forms of address to a dead poetess. The use of apostrophe in these poems points to the problems and possibilities of sympathetic identification in increasingly complex ways, leading to the proliferation of women's memorial verse in England. Turning to America, Chapter 3 reads Emily Dickinson's elegies for Elizabeth Barrett Browning as “that Foreign Lady” in order to discover a state of betweenness and estrangement that displaces the lyric subject and unsettles its national identifications. Chapter 4 shows how the nineteenth-century German translator and poet, Luise von Ploennies, lays claim to a German national identity. By translating English poetry and writing memorial poems about English poets, she reveals translation to be a reversible movement that sends poetesses into circulation.; The dissertation concludes that these “Queens of Song,” as they are often figured, draw on the rhetoric of national identity and gender while also crossing national borders and poetic traditions. The dissertation contributes to new readings of women's sentimental lyric and Anglo-German literary relations in the nineteenth century. In addition to demonstrating how the poetess circulates through various kinds of translation and memorialization, the dissertation thinks historically about the circulation of lyric in the nineteenth century.