Women and the Lyric In and Beyond the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The article provides an overview of publishing and critical debates concerning women’s poetry and moves on critical practice from binarist conceptions of gender. Looking back over the twentieth century, it demonstrates how poets had to negotiate with taboos against female self-expression as an artistic enterprise for women. Drawing uponthe recent tendency towards “geopolitical identity”, I suggest ways in which we might read variations of the lyric that free it from a feminised sentimentalised notion of confessionalism. Adorno (1974), Culler (1975), Maguire (2000) and Wills (2000) view it as the most potent of literatures because it validates literary expressions of empirical experience as counter-discursive. Reading geopolitically, we avoid the reductions of a postmodern scepticism towards the articulation of a fixed, universalising unitary self or the politics of identity which seeks authentic self-expression. All through the century we find women who expertly reorientate lyrical expression through disruptive syntax, sophisticated metaphors, internal or social dialogues. Into the new century, Duffy’s acclaimed Rapture (2005) is autobiographical yet richly intertextual; the indeterminate pronouns and rich symbolism set up a benchmark for reading “beyond gender”, that is both personally speciffc and globally mobile.