The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century British and Irish Women’s Poetry

Abstract

This Companion is intended for readers interested in the emerging canons of twentieth-century poetry, in studying poetry by women as a genre, and in critical work on the selected poets. Whereas A History provided a comprehensive, strictly chronological survey along with critical readings of the most significant poets in each of three historical periods (1900-45; 1945-80; 1980-200), the essays in the Companion are both complementary and distinct by attending to poets, forms and literary trends that run across period-bound delineations. Furthermore, they harness context-based criticism with concepts about aesthetic and cultural formations, such as psychoanalysis, space, postcolonialism and ‘affect’, that are central approaches to the century’s literature. Thus, it offers students and teachers paradigms of essays that integrate close reading with theoretical analyses that can be transferred to poets beyond the ones under discussion.