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…
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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,…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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 origins and ongoing legacies of American Spiritualism in their relations to mainstream religion, science, and politics are by this point well-charted. As a vector between, on one side, esoteric philosophy and diffuse pseudo-scientific and occult disciplines, and, on the othe…
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…