In the canon of twentieth century American poetry, "long poems" or "anti-epics" or epic poems represent a formidable genre. Defining epic poetry has proved difficult in our modern era, and the possibility that women might write epics is not often considered. This study includes a review of the literature that may define the epic genre and of the literature that contributes to our understanding of a tradition of women's poetry in American literature. The review of both issues--possible epic poetry and women's poetic tradition--is a necessary prerequisite for considering the argument that H.D.'s iielen in Eavpt and Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca are twentieth century epics. With the focus on a female heroine, on personal and interpersonal values, and on a reconsideration of cultural lieroism, these poems are important literary contributions in addition to being "revised" epics.A revision of the epic signifies that the poet has found a way to accomplish individual expression in this familiar genre, a genre characterized by narration, cultural themes that may be didactic, and multiple voices for the poet. H.D. and Brooks have revised the genre of epic poetry in unusual ways. H.D. has taken a legendary figure, Helen of Troy, and made her the primary speaker and the seeker of truth. Instead of the classical glorification of war, Helen's quest includes a renunciation of war and a reconsideration of the ways we know ourselves and our history. Brooks has made an "unknown" black woman the center of her urban epic. Mrs. Sallie's quest, initiated by the real search for a missing daughter, becomes a quest for the meaning of family, community, and selfhood.Revising the genre was a unique process for both H.D. and Brooks, and studying Helen and Mecca together emphasizes the diverse traditions--literary and nonliterary--that may elucidate our understanding of each poem. Moreover, only refers to a "a genre revised" by H.D. and Brooks not only refers to a revision of epic poetry but to poetry as a whole. Each woman created her own blend of "traditions and individual talent" in order to produce Helen in Egypt and In the Mecca. / Department of English

“Sites of Inscription” argues that creative works allow us to trace black epistemologies of space and time in the United States. Reading works of literature and art from the 19th century to the present, I trace how black people have creatively mis-used, reimagined, and transformed the spatial technologies of the plantation and its geographic afterlife. My project specifically asks how the “literary” in black literary geographies reveals and preserves black spatial praxes in ways that exceed the capacities of dominant modes of Western spatial representation such as conventional maps, blueprints or land surveys. Each chapter considers literary form in particular to be intimately related to the production and representation of space by black people—both as ways of expressing the experience of living under spatial technologies of racialized management, enclosure and exploitation, and as ways of expressing resistance to these technologies and the underwriting epistemologies they reproduce. Employing a palimpsestic practice of reading, I gather texts written across periods but which cohere around a single spatial formation that stages the tensions of (post)plantation geographies—fences, city blocks, apartments, and rooftops. Reading works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Zora Neale Hurston, I consider the relationship between writing and enclosure in the South during and immediately after slavery. Moving North and into the 20th century, I consider representations of the city block in work by Romare Bearden, Tonya Foster, and Langston Hughes. The art of apartment living in Chicago is explored through readings of Kerry James Marshall and Gwendolyn Brooks. I conclude on the rooftop, where Claude Brown, Piri Thomas, and Faith Ringgold document its creative re-production. All four chapters explore the impact of these radical acts of counter-planning, and efforts to represent them, on literary form and genre—concluding that formal experimentations are precisely what allow literature and visual art to archive these fugitive and fleeting engagements with space.

ix, 267 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / In English literary studies, classical epic poetry is typically regarded as a masculinist genre that imparts and reinforces the values of dominant culture. The Iliad , Odyssey , and Aeneid , after all, were written by men, feature male heroes, and recount the violent events that gave rise to the misogynistic societies of ancient Greece and Rome. Yet, in the twentieth century, women poets have found inspiration for their feminist projects in these ostensibly masculinist poems. The four poets in this study, for example, have drawn from the work of Homer and Virgil to criticize the ways that conventional conceptions of gender identity have impaired both men and women. One might expect, and indeed, most critics argue, that women like H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Glück, and Anne Carson invoke their classical predecessors only to reject them and the repressive values that they represent. Close readings of these poets' work, however, demonstrate that, far from dismissing the ancient poems, Helen in Egypt , Annie Allen , Meadowlands , and Autobiography of Red are deeply invested in them, finding in them models for their own social critiques. The work of these four poets emphasizes that the classical epics are not one-dimensional celebrations of violence and traditional masculinity. Indeed, the work of Homer and Virgil expresses anxiety about the misogynistic values of the heroic code to which its warriors adhere, and it urges that war and violence are antithetical to civilized society. In examining the ways that modern women poets have drawn from these facets of the ancient works to condemn the sexism, racism, and heterocentrism of contemporary culture, my dissertation seeks to challenge the characterization of classical epic that prevails in English literary studies and to assert the necessity of understanding the complexity of the ancient texts that inspire modern poets. Taking an intertextual approach, I hope to show that close readings of the classical epics facilitate our understanding of how and why modern women have engaged the work of their ancient predecessors and that this knowledge, in turn, emphasizes that the epic genre is more complex than we have recognized and that its tradition still flourishes. / Committee in charge: Karen Ford, Chairperson, English; Paul Peppis, Member, English; Steven Shankman, Member, English; P. Lowell Bowditch, Outside Member, Classics

x, 237 p. / We have too frequently approached American World War II poetry with assumptions about modern poetry based on readings of the influential British Great War poets, failing to distinguish between WWI and WWII and between the British and American contexts. During the Second World War, the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki obliterated the line many WWI poems reinforced between the soldier's battlefront and the civilian's homefront, authorizing for the first time both civilian and soldier perspectives. Conditions on the American homefront--widespread isolationist and anti-Semitic attitudes, America's late entry into the war, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese internment, and the African American "Double V Campaign" to fight fascism overseas and racism at home--were just some of the volatile conditions poets in the US grappled with during WWII. In their poems, war shapes and threatens the identities of civilians and soldiers, women and men, African Americans and Jews, and verse form itself becomes a weapon against war's assault on identity. Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Richard Wilbur mobilize and challenge the authority of traditional poetic forms to defend the self against social, political, and physical assaults. The objective, free-verse testimony form of Reznikoff's long poem Holocaust (1975) registers his mistrust of lyric subjectivity and of the musical effects of traditional poetry. In Rukeyser's free-verse and traditional-verse forms, personal experiences and public history collide to create a unifying poetry during wartime. Brooks, like Rukeyser, posits poetry's ability to protect soldiers and civilians from war's threat to their identities. In Brooks's poems, however, only traditionally formal poems can withstand the war's destruction. Wilbur also employs conventional forms to control war's disorder. The individual speakers in his poems avoid becoming nameless war casualties by grounding themselves in military and literary history. Through a series of historically informed close readings, this dissertation illuminates a neglected period in the history of American poetry and argues that mid-century formalism challenges--not retreats from--twentieth-century atrocities. / Committee in charge: Karen Jackson Ford, Chairperson; John Gage, Member; Paul Peppis, Member; Cecilia Enjuto Rangel, Outside Member