The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres

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The Political Poetess challenges familiar accounts of the figure of the nineteenth-century Poetess, offering new readings of Poetess performance and criticism. In performing the Poetry of Woman, the mythic Poetess has long staked her claims as a creature of "separate spheres"-one exempt from emerging readings of nineteenth-century women's political

Reviews

"It will be required reading for advanced scholars of Anglo-American poetry and women's writing." * Choice *
"Intellectual vibrant [and] important. . . . A politically committed, intellectually generous, and abundantly useful book."---Julia Hansen, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature
"An unforgettable account of female poets as blazingly politically involved. Lootens turns the Poetess on her head in The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres. No longer a pale, lovely, swooning maiden, Lootenss Poetess is a person of color, a person deeply imbricated in transatlantic antislavery rhetoric, a woman who speaks for a nation. In bravura rereadings of well-known poems (and some not known at all), Lootens makes us see anew by interrogating 'how national sentimentality thinks.'"---Talia Schaffer, Studies in English Literature
"Lootens marshals a considerable number of cultural sources, literary and not, to build a thorough case for her reexamination of the connections between racial and separate spheres ideology. . . . At its ambitious best, The Political Poetess suspends the boundaries that continue to haunt our current critical lives: between black and white, public and private, British and American, past and present."---Amanda Adams, Victorian Periodicals Review
"In all these ways, the Political Poetess becomes integral to the revisionist history of the female literary tradition emphasising national anxieties. . . . [Lootens] reads with acumen and diligently researches the historical circumstances of poetic production."---Georgia Gotsi, Historical Review

Author Bio

Tricia Lootens is associate professor of English and Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization.