Moments of brocade: The aesthetics of excess in American women's poetry
Ford, Karen Jackson
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/19209
Description
Title
Moments of brocade: The aesthetics of excess in American women's poetry
Author(s)
Ford, Karen Jackson
Issue Date
1989
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Nelson, Cary
Department of Study
Dept. of English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Women's Studies
Literature, American
Language
eng
Abstract
"The dissertation identifies and explores a female literary tradition that I am calling the ""poetics of excess."" The purpose of the study is to offer a new way to read certain women poets whom readers have regarded as flawed by various stylistic and thematic excesses. Instead of thinking of excess as a weakness, I take it to be a deliberate aesthetic strategy for overcoming the limitations that the dominant literary culture imposes on a woman writer. I build my theoretical argument not only on reading of the poems but also on analyses of the letters, journals, and other prose works of the main poets in this tradition--Dickinson, Stein, and Plath. In each chapter I pursue extended reading of their key poems about composition to demonstrate both the workings of excess in the poetry and the poem's own recapitulation of the need for such an aesthetic."
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