A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry

A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry offers a detailed evaluative documentary record of the publications, activities and achievements of a lively but undervalued literary community. Part literary history, part critical analysis, this comprehensive survey is organised into three historical periods (1900-1945, 1945-1980 and 1980-2000), each part introduced by a comprehensive overview in which the emerging names are mapped against cultural, literary and poetic events and trends. Individual essays reflect and stimulate continuing debates about the nature of women’s poetry and cover a range of canonical and lesser-known, but significant, poets. They offer new critical approaches to reading poems that engage with, for example, war, domesticity, modernism, linguistic innovation, place, the dramatic monologue, postmodernism and the lyric. A chronology and detailed bibliography of primary and secondary sources covering over 200 writers make this an invaluable reference source for scholars and students of British poetry and women’s writing.