This study incorporates archival and historical research on women poets and editors and their roles in the production of modernist and/or leftist little-magazine cultures in Canada. Where the first three chapters investigate women poets who were also magazine editors and/or members of magazine groups, the fourth chapter takes account of women magazine editors who were not themselves poets. Within this framework, the dissertation relates women's editorial work and poetry to a series of crises and transitions in Canada's leftist and modernist little-magazine cultures between 1926 and 1956. This historical pattern of crisis and transition pertains at once to the poetry of Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, P. K. Page, and Miriam Waddington and to the little-magazine groups in which they and other women were active as editors and/or contributing members. Chapter 1 deals with Livesay's editorial activities and poetry in the context of two magazines of the cultural left, Masses and New Frontier, between 1932 and 1937. Chapter 2 concerns Livesay, Marriott, their involvement in poetry groups in Victoria and Vancouver, and their publications in Contemporary Verse and Canadian Poetry Magazine, between 1935 and 1956. Chapter 3 addresses the poetry of Page and Waddington published in Preview and First Statement from 1942 to 1945, their poetry appearing in Contemporary Verse from 1941 to 1952--53, and their editorial activities in and/or relationships to these Montreal and Victoria - Vancouver magazine groups between 1941 and 1956. Chapter 4 documents the histories of some often forgotten women who edited modernist or leftist little magazines in Canada between 1926 and 1956. These core chapters are prefaced and concluded by histories of the antecedents to and descendants of Canadian modernist and leftist magazine cultures.

Thesis (M.A.)--Auburn University, 2008. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 37-40).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 357-367 ).

M.A. / Although critics have acknowledged the work of Wilma Stockenstrom and have responded favourably, and although she has received four awards and prizes for her poetry up to the publication of Monsterverse, no all-embracing study of her poetry has been undertaken. Many of the reviews and critical analyses have failed to give proper recognition to her first two volumes of poetry. Consequently the process of development in her work has been largely overlooked, and Monsterverse, although acclaimed, has been assessed as "problematic" and totally "foreign". This study therefore attempts to determine the tendencies which figure in Wilma Stockenstrom's poetry, and examines in particular the iconicity of thematics and prosody as it has developed throughout successive volumes. Most of the themes developed in the later volumes are introduced in her debut work, Vir die Bysiende Leser. Some of the themes explored in this volume, however, lose their significance in later volumes. Although the prosody is still somewhat uncertain in some of the poems, a few poems already suggest her unique and individualistic application of this aspect of style. In this early work it is already apparent that her real power lies in the writing of free verse. She exploits this verse form with rich variety throughout her four volumes. Vir die Bysiende Leser clearly functions as a unit. The intratextuality of the poems is a striking structural aspect of. this work. Unity is also emphasized in the following three volumes, but progressively more attention is given to intertextuality. Stockenstrom's work clearly links up with the intertextual tradition which N. P. van Wyk Louw's Tristia and D.J. Opperman's Komas uit n Bamboesstok have established in Afrikaans literature.

The "dramatic monologue" is curiously named, given that poems of this genre often feature characters not only listening to the speakers but responding to them. While "silent auditors," as such inscribed characters are imperfectly called, are not a universal feature of the genre, their appearance is crucial when it occurs, as it turns monologue into dialogue. The scholarly attention given to such figures has focused almost exclusively upon dramatic monologues by Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and other male poets and has consequently never illustrated how gender influences the attitudes toward and outcomes of communication as they play out in dramatic monologues. My dissertation thus explores how Victorian and modernist female poets of the dramatic monologue like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Augusta Webster, Amy Levy, and Charlotte Mew stage the relationships between the female speakers they animate and the silent auditors who listen to their desperate utterances. Given the historical tensions that surrounded any woman's speech, let alone marginalized women, the poets perform a remarkably empathetic act in embodying primarily female characters on the fringes of their social worlds--a runaway slave, a prostitute, and a modern-day Mary Magdalene, to name a few--but the dramatic monologues themselves end, overwhelmingly, in failures of communication that question the ability of dialogue to generate empathetic connections between individuals with radically different backgrounds. Silent auditors often bear the scholarly blame for such breakdowns, but I argue that the speakers reject their auditors at pivotal moments, ultimately participating in their own marginalization. The distrust these poems exhibit toward the efficacy of speaking to others, however, need not extend to the reader. Rather, the genre of the dramatic monologue offers the poets a way to sidestep dialogue altogether: by inducing the reader to inhabit the female speaker's first-person voice--the "mobile I," in Èmile Benveniste's terms--these dramatic monologues convey experience through role-play rather than speech, as speaker and reader momentarily collapse into one body and one voice. Such a move foregrounds sympathetic identification as a more powerful means of conveying experience than empathetic identification and the distance between bodies and voices it necessitates.

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Thesis (DLitt (Afrikaans and Dutch))--University of Stellenbosch, 2005. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The construction of the female subject in the poetry of Afrikaans women poets since 1970 is examined with reference to the oeuvres of Sheila Cussons, Ina Rousseau, Wilma Stockenström and Antjie Krog. The work of three French feminists, namely Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, is selected as the theoretical framework, because of, amongst other reasons, their attention to the structuring role which language plays in the construction of subjectivity. In terms of defining the scope more precisely, there is a specific focus on the role of the mother-daughter relationship, as reflected in the work of these three women. This focus examines not only biological mother-daughter relationships, but also the stance which women adopt regarding the “place of the mother”, as well as the way in which the relationship with the mother’s body emerges in the writing of women. The question is posed whether there is indeed a clearly identifiable feminine subject in the oevres of the four Afrikaans women discussed and, if so, whether this feminine subject is potentially capable of destabilising or even subverting the prevailing patriarchal order.