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9780252034619 Academic Inspection Copy

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American Women Poets and Alcohol
  • ISBN-13: 9780252034619
  • Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
    Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
  • By Brett Candlish Millier
  • Price: AUD $90.99
  • Stock: 2 in stock
  • Availability: Order will be despatched as soon as possible.
  • Local release date: 14/10/2009
  • Format: Hardback (229.00mm X 152.00mm) 168 pages Weight: 520g
  • Categories: Sociology [JHB]
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The relationship between alcoholism and the poetic process has been well established, but the history of heavy-drinking poets in the twentieth century tilts disproportionately toward male writers such as John Berryman, Robert Lowell, or Theodore Roethke. Women poets, however, were just as susceptible to alcohol, and they very often wrote about its effects on their bodies, minds, and lives. In this study, Brett C. Millier looks at the role of drinking in the lives and poetry of American women poets in the first half of the twentieth century. Millier reads the poems of Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, Léonie Adams, Isabella Gardner, and Elizabeth Bishop--and in counterpoint, the poems of Jean Garrigue--to see how they negotiated their alcoholism with their art.Despite the shame and isolation these writers suffered as a result of their heavy drinking and despite the oppressive restrictions on subject matter placed on women poets by the critical establishment in this era, these female poets nevertheless wrote about alcohol. Millier looks at figures for alcohol and inebriation that these writers used in their work in defiance of the masculine Modernist code of impersonality in art.
Preface iv; Acknowledgments xi; Women Poets and Alcohol: An Introduction 13; Chapter 1 - ''Just a Little One'': Dorothy Parker as Archetype 35; Chapter 2 - ''The Alchemist'': Louise Bogan 59; Chapter 3 - ''I must not die of pity'': Edna St. Vincent Millay's Addictions 97; Chapter 4 - ''Hold to Oblivion'': Elinor Wylie's Intolerable Life 122; Chapter 5 - ''Thought's End'': Leonie Adams and the Life of the Mind 143; Chapter 6 - ''Words from the Piazza del Limbo'': Isabella Gardner as Fallen Woman 169; Chapter 7 - ''The Prodigal'': Elizabeth Bishop's Exile 194; Chapter 8 - Jean Garrigue: An Epilogue 225; Afterword 240; Notes 246; Works Cited 255
''Millier makes a convincing case for the way these poems engage, often in veiled forms, with both the allures of alcohol for women writers and the consequent dangers of alcoholism. An intelligent and captivating work.'' Thomas Travisano, editor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
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