Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss

Susan McCabe

Published by Penn State University Press 1994

Elizabeth Bishop

Her Poetics of Loss

Susan McCabe

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271076850

Overview
Contents

About this book

Elizabeth Bishop represents a full-scale examination of Bishop's work—poetry, prose, and selected unpublished material—to reveal how personal loss becomes implicated in her vision of self as fluid and unfixed and, at the same time, how gender and sexual identity inform the experience of loss in the act of writing. Susan McCabe argues that Bishop counters modernist claims for an autonomous art object and an impersonal artist; Bishop's writing never represents an escape into perfected forms, but instead calls attention to the processes of language that construct identity. McCabe emphasizes how personal experience is deeply enmeshed with Bishop's poetics. Bishop's project returns to her early losses—the death of her father and her mother's madness—and uses them to disclose the instability of the concepts of self or place through a rhetoric of indeterminacy and uncertainty. Although Bishop has recently begun to receive the critical attention she deserves, this book uniquely brings loss to the foreground in connection with identity, gender, and the fashioning of a feminist poetics.

Author / Editor information

McCabe Susan :

Susan McCabe is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University.

Reviews

“I believe McCabe's work to be of utmost significance to the currently deepening and crucial discussion of Bishop's oeuvre. Its interpretations are affirmative and enabling. Its feminism is synthetic and inclusive, liberating to any reader. Most important, McCabe's is the first book to present Bishop's poetry as a successful entirety, a coherent, humane, and progressive enterprise.”
—Donald Revell, University of Denver

“This book develops a coherent and interesting vision of Bishop's work, centering on a poetics of loss and of the homemade. Keeping in view the autobiographical dimensions of Bishop's writing as well as her consciousness of her gender and her lesbianism, the book sensitively explicates Bishop's complex explorations of isolation and connection, her ways of constructing an often soluble self through the imaginative action of memory. McCabe offers insightful readings of the poems, moving easily among Bishop's various works to highlight their connections, and drawing upon an interesting range of theoretical frames. McCabe contributes valuably to current feminist reevaluations of Bishop; she also joins current critical efforts to counter some of the reductive earlier readings that positioned Bishop only as a naturalist, an artist of precise and impersonal description.”
—Lynne Keller, University of Wisconsin

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
1. Writing Loss Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Artifices of Independence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	37
3. A Conspiring Root of Desire: The Search for Love Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	99
4. Imagined Places and the Questions of History Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	143
5. Remembering the Homemade Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	193
Conclusion: "That Peculiar Affirmative" Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251
Select Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	261
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267

Language: English
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 296
Keywords: Susan McCabe; 0-271-02561-1; Literature; American; feminism; autobiographic; gender; lesbianism; poetry; prose; unpublished material; personal experience; death; father; mother's madness; identity; us; united states; usa

eBook

Published: May 26, 2021
ISBN: 9780271076850