Revolution in Poetic Consciousness. An Existential Reading of Mid-Twentieth-Century Bristish Womens'

Revolution in Poetic Consciousness is a considerable and groundbreaking piece of work. It provides a most substantial, perceptive, and well-informed account of a neglected body of English poetry from the middle years of the twentieth century. Starting from the hypothesis that an excessive concern with movements, schools and literary generations has generated maps of English poetry from which important and interesting poets - especially women poets - have been effaced, Revolution in Poetic Consciousness recovers, situates and re-situates a lost and undeservedly ignored generation of writers in the poetic landscape between 1938 and 1965: Frances Bellerby, Lilian Bowes Lyon, Frances Cornford, Phoebe Hesketh, Elizabeth Jennings, Kathleen Nott, Ruth Pitter, Kathleen Raine, Anne Ridler, E.J. Scovell, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Dorothy Wellesley, and Sheila Wingfield. For the purpose of reading these poets, a new typology of poetic categories (types of ethos, modes, voices) is evolved, which is disturbingly relevant to both genre theories and current discussions of the self. Revolution in Poetic Consciousness won the Kardinal-Innitzer Förderungspreis 2001. Volume I: Poetry, Self, and Culture discusses the cultural, critical and conceptual framework within which this typological scheme is developed. It draws on a plethora of ideas about the self, identity, and consciousness in fields other than those of literary criticism and challenges both romantic self-expressive theories of poetry and poststructuralist notions of the fictionality, (inter-) textuality and discursiveness of the self.