Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy

Victoria Harrison traces Elizabeth Bishop's career, dividing her work into three chronological periods of activity: her early work, her writing in Brazil, and her late retrospective verse.

Victoria Harrison (Author)

9780521062121, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 15 May 2008

272 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.4 kg

"Harrison is strong, alert, and sometimes downright revelatory when engaged with poems and stories (especially unpublished writings) that deal with Bishop's inner-conflicts about sexuality, anger, politics, and culture....[T]his challenging contribution to Bishop studies is strongly recommended for advanced undergraduates, graduates, and faculty." Choice

By offering a fresh look at Bishop criticism that has moved from purely formal concerns and post-modern interpretations to more recent feminist analysis, Victoria Harrison traces Elizabeth Bishop's career, dividing her work into three chronological periods of activity: her early work, her writing in Brazil, and her late retrospective verse. By examining letters and notebooks, Harrison unfolds the biographical events that influenced Bishop's poetic style, addressing her treatment of such topics as family relations, history, politics, war, love, sexuality and ethnic differences. Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy delves extensively into the Bishop archives. Making wider use of Bishop's unpublished work, Harrison explores Bishop's childhood memoirs, journals, letters, Brazilian travel prose, unfinished poems and draft material. The reproduction of these archival materials - with revisions, cancelled lines, notes - shows a mind at work and a career in evolution.

Acknowledgements
Note on the text
Introduction
1. Articulating a personal poetics
2. Writing intimacy
3. Turning history under
4. Gathering in a childhood
5. Confronting Brazil
6. Closing together
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]