Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award

Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic

Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic

Description

(from the publishers site)

Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic is concerned not only with her inimitable style, but also larger questions to do with the Anglo-American shift from closed to open forms in the twentieth century. This study identifies not just borrowings from, but rich intertextual relationships with, writers as diverse as—among others—Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, and Dorothy Richardson. (Though Bishop criticized Woolf, she in particular is treated as a central and thus far neglected precursor, crucial to our understanding of Bishop as a feminist poet.) Finally, the sustained discussion of how the history of prose frames effects of rhythm, syntax, and acoustic texture—in both Bishop’s prose proper and her prosaic verse—extends a body of research which seeks now to treat literature as a form of cognition. Technique and thought are finely wedded in Bishop’s work—her literary forms evince a historical intelligence attuned to questions of power, nationality, tradition (both literary and otherwise), race, and gender

ISBN

9781611486840

Publication Date

7-2015

Publisher

Bucknell University Press

Keywords

literary criticism, race, gender, semiotics, women authors

Disciplines

American Literature | Arts and Humanities | Critical and Cultural Studies | Nonfiction | Poetry

Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic

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