White Women Writing White: H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Whiteness

(Hardback)

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Just as the cultural background of readers shapes how they respond to texts, the context in which writers live shapes what they write. When a context is dominant within a culture, the effects of that context upon an author may be taken for granted and thus overlooked. Race is a powerful factor in shaping literary works. Literature by black writers, for example, often reflects the experiences of African Americans. At the same time, though perhaps less obviously, literature by white writers may similarly reflect the experience of being white. This book argues that H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath wrote from an unproclaimed dominant white perspective that becomes evident in their poetry. Loosely delineated, writing white constitutes writing authored from an acknowledged or unacknowledged white perspective; writing that implies or explicitly delivers the concept of whiteness to a text; writing that remains unconcerned with white racial politics internal and external to the text; and writing that uses the word white to maintain ideological systems of mastery and dichotomy. This book examines numerous poems in terms of whiteness. Each chapter places one poet in the larger context of historical and cultural racial events prevalent during the time of her writing and explores the particular poems created and published during that period.

Reviews

"Curry's bracing investigation of poetry and whiteness makes the previously invisible much easier to see."-David Wyatt University of Maryland
"Renee Curry's White Women Writing White is an admirably well researched, independent, brave, and often brilliant and startling study. It will undoubtedly prove germinal in critical whiteness studies, an important new sub-field in literary and cultural studies. This book provides an absolutely new perspective on the poets Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. It draws attention, truly for the first time, to the racial signifiers in the texts of these three great poets. It treats whiteness as a marked characteristic in the way that blackness and Asian-ness have always functioned as marked traits in American literature and culture. It repeatedly and convincingly locates racial meanings in passages that have never been read in that light before. This book transforms the landscape. It is the most significant new work on these poets in years."-Steven Gould Axelrod Professor of English, University of California, Riverside
.,."this book, by "shed[ding] a stark light on [the] whiteness" that permeates the study of all things American, may help begin the process of peeling back those cultural accoutrements."-JASAT
...this book, by "shed[ding] a stark light on [the] whiteness" that permeates the study of all things American, may help begin the process of peeling back those cultural accoutrements.-JASAT
White Women Writing is an important book for feminist teachers and scholars of women's poetry, and I won't teach these poets again without it.-NWSA Journal
..."this book, by "shedding a stark light on the whiteness" that permeates the study of all things American, may help begin the process of peeling back those cultural accoutrements."-JASAT
"White Women Writing is an important book for feminist teachers and scholars of women's poetry, and I won't teach these poets again without it."-NWSA Journal
..."this book, by "shed[ding] a stark light on [the] whiteness" that permeates the study of all things American, may help begin the process of peeling back those cultural accoutrements."-JASAT

Author Bio

RENE R. CURRY is Associate Professor of Literature and Writing at California State University, San Marcos. She is the editor of Perspectives on Woody Allen (1996) and coeditor of States of Rage: Emotional Eruption, Violence, and Social Change (1996).