Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry

In Fair Copy Jennifer Putzi studies the composition, publication, and circulation of American women's poetry in the antebellum United States. In opposition to a traditional scholarly emphasis on originality and individuality, or a recovery method centered on author-based interventions, Putzi proposes a theory and methodology of relational poetics: focusing on poetry written by working-class and African American women poets, she demonstrates how an emphasis on relationships between and among people and texts shaped the poems that women wrote, the avenues they took to gain access to print, and the way their poems functioned within a variety of print cultures. Yet it is their very relationality which has led to these poems and the poets who published them being written out of literary history. models a radical reading and recovery of this work in a way that will redirect the study of nineteenth-century American women's poetry.
Read more