Preface Abbreviations 1. Introduction 2. "Inquisitive Intensity" in Marianne Moore 3. An "Unintelligible Vernacular": Questions of Voice 4. "Your Thorns Are the Best Part of You": Gender Politics in the Nongendered Poem 5. "The Labors of Hercules": Celebrating and Overcoming "Race" 6. Quotation, Community, and Correspondences 7. Questioning Authority in the Late Twentieth Century Notes Index
Cristanne Miller is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of English at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Her many books include Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar, Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century, and Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them.
A bold and significant study of the function of Moore’s distinct
and strategic use of poetic authority… Miller’s book is also an
original contribution to existing Moore scholarship in its
insistence of the intricate relationship between Moore’s poetic
practice and her political and cultural engagement with the world
she inhabited. Miller’s analysis of the historical and cultural
forces that necessarily shaped Moore’s life and work is insightful
and meticulous in its range of reference… Miller’s readings of
Moore’s poems about race and nationality are provocative,
suggestive, and far-reaching in their implications for future
considerations of modernist writers’ responses to race… Miller’s
book is admirable in its carefully orchestrated balance between
close readings of Moore’s work and nuanced readings of the
historical context in which she worked and produced her art. The
revisionary thrust of this book is important, timely, and a major
contribution to Moore studies and the history of modernism.
*American Literature*
An elegant tribute to a complex style… Gender, race, class and
power are subjects which are used [by Miller] convincingly to
unearth embedded references to several aspects of social control in
the poetry itself. As if in tribute to one element of Moore’s
style—that of eclectic reference and quotation—Miller’s prose is
densely peppered with speech marks, as she continuously returns to
Moore’s diction to clarify her argument about authority as a social
(and artistic) nexus.
*London Quarterly*
Miller combines feminist categories of understanding with close
linguistic analysis, offering a range of nuanced readings of
particular poems.
*American Studies*
Cristanne Miller’s scholarship is impressive and her wide ranging
references add to the book’s solidity and helpfulness for readers
interested in twentieth century American poetics, in feminist
issues, and more generally, in ‘questions of authority’ in our age.
Highly recommended.
*American Studies in Europe*
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