Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934

Duplessis shows how, through poetic language, modernist writers represented the debates around social issues.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Author)

9780521483353, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 11 January 2001

254 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.38 kg

"the book is excitingly clear in its social investments, and offers a means for responsibilty bodying forth those investments in original dense, richly textured, and highly plausible readings." Modernism/Modernity 11/01

In Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetries, Rachel Blau Duplessis shows how, through poetic language, modernist writers represented the debates and ideologies concerning New Woman, New Negro and New Jew in the early twentieth century. From the poetic text emerge such social issues of modernity as debates on suffrage, sexuality, manhood, and African-American and Jewish subjectivities. By a reading method she calls 'social philology' - a form of close reading inflected with the approaches of cultural studies - Duplessis engages with the work of such canonical poets as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and H. D., as well as Mina Loy, Countee Cullen, Alfred Kreymborg and Langston Hughes, writers, she claims, still marginalized by existing constructions of modernism. This book is an ambitious attempt to remap our understanding of modern poetries and poetics, and the relationship between early twentieth-century writing and society.

Acknowledgements
1. Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetries
2. 'Corpses of poesy': modern poets consider dome gender ideologies of lyric
3. 'Seismic orgasm': sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
4. 'HOO, HOO, HOO': some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness
5. 'Darken your speech': racialized cultural work in black and white poets
6. 'Wondering Jews': melting pots and mongrel thoughts
Notes
Works cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Social theory [JHBA], Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Cultural studies [JFC], Literary studies: general [DSB]