Doolittle, Hilda

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…

This dissertation examines the trope of initiation, the figure of the initiate, and depictions of ritual in H.D.'s drama, novels, and verse sequences. I focus in particular on classical, anthropological, psychoanalytic, and occult concepts of initiation that informed H.D.'s life…

In H.D's lyric epic, Helen in Egypt, Helen of Troy experiences a phenomenological transformation in the brazier of the heart, which burns both on the beach of her new home in Egypt and in the depths of her psychic life. I have envisioned a process by which Helen psychologically …

This study argues for the centrality of dance to the style and structure of three modern epics: H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, William Carlos Williams' Paterson and James Joyce's Ulysses. My critical approach is twofold: I examine how the modern epic is conceptualized through dance aest…

Nella Larsen, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. address issues of transidentification and multiplicity in their work, rejecting appropriated female identity common within American literature. This study includes Larsen's Passing (1929) and Quicksand (1928), Stein's Three Lives (1909), an…

In the last three decades, critical attention to the major work of H.D. has placed her in the Anglo-American canon as a significant modernist; however, some critics have recently questioned her power to remain there. The feminist and psychoanalytic frameworks that moved H.D. fro…

In the early twentieth century, critics accused women writing their personal experiences of being overly “sentimental.” Many women poets dissociated themselves from such accusations by composing impersonal poetry, yet many still wrote about the self through poetic experimentatio…

This dissertation examines James Joyce, H.D., and John Berryman, three writers whose Modernisms revise masculinity. Joyce decides that freedom from patriarchal paralysis can be found only within a plural subject. An epiphany, instead of being a moment of objective enlightenment,…

My dissertation explores ways in which the heroic epic may be challenged and re-formed in order to affirm an autonomous female subject. My specific foci are the feminized epics of American poets H.D. and Judy Grahn: H.D.'s Helen in Egypt and Judy Grahn's two volumes, The Queen o…

This dissertation studies the origins and transformations of Hilda Doolittle and Ezra Pound's unique conceptions of gender and creativity and, in turn, analyzes the degree to which their philosophies regarding each concept influenced their political and poetic lives, that is, th…

H.D.'s literary recovery of matriarchal myths has been examined by a number of her critics. H.D. scholars have approached her interest in matriarchal myths either through events in her life or through feminist methodologies. My dissertation grounds H.D.'s approach to the past in…

The poetry of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle 1886-1961) ranges from her early Imagist work to her late epic-length poems. We must consider her poetry as a whole if we are to recognize the integral role of the poetry of H.D.'s middle years in contributing to her late and greatest poetic a…

This dissertation examines the experience of solitude from a feminist perspective. Through an analysis of specific works by four twentieth-century women writers, a conception of solitude is developed that moves beyond traditional, male-defined associations and literary represent…

Critics traditionally have defined the epic as a genre marked by a central authoritative and culturally influential voice. Consequently, they have viewed many twentieth-century long poems as fragmented, failed epics or not as epics at all. Using and revising the theory of hetero…

The dissertation examines "eternal moments" in H.D.'s late long poems. I relate H.D.'s construction of these moments to her montage strategies of repetition, reordering, and conflictual juxtaposition. At the same time, I read H.D.'s epiphanies as points at which she rhetorically…

H.D., the twentieth century American woman poet, is most often thought of as "the perfect imagist," or the imagist poet whose work best demonstrates the early twentieth century's imagist movement's poetics. But H.D. is also known, at least by her contemporaries, as an exceptiona…