Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"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, Lootens’s 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
