Modern women's poetry 1910-1929

In tracing the publications and publishing initiatives of early twentieth-century women poets in Britain, this thesis reviews their work in the context of a male-dominated literary environment and the cultural shifts relating to the First World War, women's suffrage and the growth of popular culture.;The first two chapters outline a climate of new rights and opportunities in which women became public poets for the first time. They ran printing presses and bookshops, edited magazines and wrote criticism. They aimed to align themselves with a male tradition which excluded them and insisted upon their difference. Defining themselves antithetically to the mythologised poetess; of the nineteenth century and popular verse, they developed strategies for disguising their gender through indeterminate speakers, fictional dramatisations or anti-realist subversions.;Chapter Three explores the ways in which women's poems of the First World War register the changing ideologies of gender and nationalism. Chapter Four identifies a 'conservative modernity' in women who avoided femininity, through universal speakers and the conventional forms of male-associated traditions, but there is also a covert woman's agenda, particularly in the love lyrics of Vita Sackville-West.;The remaining chapters recognise women's participation in modernist innovation through radical aesthetics or radical subject matter. In 'The British Avant-Garde', the most significant experimentalist in Edith Sitwell, but the less well-known work of Nancy Cunard, Iris Tree and Helen Rootham, is also considered. Chapter Six, 'The Anglo-American Avant-Garde', includes American women who lived in Britain or who were indirectly influential through the network of writers in London, Paris and New York: H.D., Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding, Marianne Moore and Mina Loy. The final group of 'Female Modernists', Charlotte Mews, May Sinclair, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anna Wickam and Sylvia Townsend Warner, project a feminist consciousness in negotiation with poetic formalism. They indicate women's progress towards a new self-asserting aesthetic.