Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Putzi’sstudy is a remarkable intervention in the study of nineteenth-century US women writers—known and unknown, recovered and yet unrecovered—because it challenges the very concept of a nineteenth-century woman writer...Putzi’s model ofrelational poetics opens up compelling possibilities for the recovery of nineteenth-centurywomenwriters,aswellasnewwaysofunderstandinghow nineteenth-century US literature was read and created." -- Elissa Zellinger * American Literary History *
"Putzi gives us an inspiring book, designed to persuade scholars of both traditional and critical literary analysis to join her in reading with respect and pleasure this body of antebellum American women’s poetry...Putzi’s work adds to helpful analyses of women’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry, especially studies of poetry’s contemporary rhetoric by Jane Donawerth, Winifred Bryan Horner, and Lynee Lewis Gaillet." * Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature *
"
Fair Copy expertly engages the composition, publication, and circulation of women’s printed poetry to produce a far-reaching theory and methodology of relational poetics as radical recovery. Moving with graceful nimbleness between this overarching framework and a precision born of copious archival work, Putzi offers a compelling narrative of women’s engagement with print and its various networks and relations—a story unknown in part because studies of nineteenth-century women’s authorship have primarily focused on prose and in part because of a scholarly emphasis on originality and individuality." * Early American Literature *
"Jennifer Putzi offers five case studies of women poets' 'relational poetics' under conditions of authorship that depend on intersecting categories of race, class, and gender. She maps the significance of unremarkable or indistinguishable practices by unknown and in some way irrecoverable women poets in order to show that the very lack of distinction or originality, the impossibility of identifying a signature style, marks the poems as accomplishments that depend on the contexts of production, circulation, and reception." * Eliza Richards, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. The American Hemans: Lydia Sigourney's Relational Poetics
Chapter 2. "The Songs Which All Can Sing": Imitation and Working Women's Poetry in the Lowell Offering
Chapter 3. "My Country": Communal Authorship and Citizenship in Sarah Louisa Forten's Liberator Poems
Chapter 4. "What Is Poetry?": Class, Collaboration, and the Making of Wales, and Other Poems
Chapter 5. "Some Queer Freak of Taste": Relational Poetics and Literary Proprietorship in the "Rock Me to Sleep" Controversy
Conclusion. Recovering the Unremarkable
Notes
Bibliography
Index
