Brooks, Gwendolyn

In this thesis, I examine Gwendolyn Brooks's diptych poems "Two Dedications" from her 1968 collection In the Mecca. Critical accounts of "Two Dedications" cast the poems as fixed oppositions between "frivolous" Western art and inspiring, communal black art. I propose that such b…

Environmental Justice Witnessing in the Modernist Poetry of Lola Ridge, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Elizabeth Bishop analyzes the poetic forms used by four modernist American women poets to trace depictions of social oppression that are tied to specific landscapes. My…

Mother Utters: Struggle and Subversion in the works of Gwendolyn Brooks explores how Brooks uses women's speech and traditional classical poetic forms to struggle with and subvert the predominant social, moral, and political systems which impede class mobility and impress Africa…

In English literary studies, classical epic poetry is typically regarded as a masculinist genre that imparts and reinforces the values of dominant culture. The Iliad , Odyssey , and Aeneid , after all, were written by men, feature male heroes, and recount the violent events that…

Scholars have scrutinized Gwendolyn Brooks, Eudora Welty, H.D., Margaret Atwood, and Louise Glück individually and collectively, in various combinations, for their use of classical myth and feminist revisionary processes. Historically, these writers studied Latin or Greek at a t…