In this dissertation, I study how ekphrasis illuminates ideas of selfhood and time in Hilda Doolittle’s (H.D.) (1886-1961), Frank O’Hara’s (1926-1966), and Elizabeth Bishop’s (1911-1979) fiction and poetry. I examine the porous boundaries between plastic (and sometimes musical) …
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This thesis examines the literary deployment of the visual in the work ofH. D. (Hilda Doolittle). Beginning with a discussion of the early poetry of ScaGarden (1916) and the essay Notes on Thought and Vision (1919), 1 argue thatH. D. 's categorisation as an Imagist poet has effa…
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…
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 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…
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…