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In this book, Rachel Blau DuPlessis shows how, through poetic language, modernist writers represented the debates around such social issues of modernity as suffrage, sexuality, manhood, and African-American and Jewish subjectivities. DuPlessis engages with the work of such canonical poets as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and H. D., as well as Mina Loy, Countee Cullen, Alfred Kreymborg and Langston Hughes, writers still marginalized by existing constructions of modernism.
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G E NDER S, R ACES A ND RELIGIO US C U LTU R ES I N M ODER N A MERICAN P O ET RY, – In Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, Rachel Blau DuPlessis shows how, through poetic language, modernist writers represented the debates and ideologies concerning New Woman, New Negro, and New Jew in the early twentieth century. From the poetic text emerge such social issues of modernity as debates on suffrage, sexuality, manhood, and AfroAmerican and Jewish subjectivities. By a reading method she calls “social philology” – a form of close reading inflected with the approaches of cultural studies – DuPlessis engages with the work of such canonical poets as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and H.D., as well as Vachel Lindsay, Mina Loy, Countee Cullen, Alfred Kreymborg, and Langston Hughes, writers, she claims, still marginalized by existing constructions of modernism. This book is an ambitious attempt to remap our understanding of modern poetries and poetics, and the relationship between early twentieth-century writing and society. is Professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Writing Beyond the Ending ( ), H.D.: The Career of that Struggle ( ), The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice ( ); she is also editor of The Selected Letters of George Oppen ( ), and coeditor of both The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics ( ) and The Feminist Memoir Project ( ). She is a widely published poet. Editor Ross Posnock, New York University Founding editor Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Advisory board Nina Baym, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University Ronald Bush, St John’s College, Oxford University Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Myra Jehlen, Rutgers University Carolyn Porter, University of California, Berkeley Robert Stepto, Yale University Recent books in the series . . Poe and the Printed Word . . The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study . Writing America Black: Race Rhetoric and the Public Sphere . Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, – . Blacks and Jews in Literary Dialogue . Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Inc. . Afrocentrism, Antimodernism, and Utopia . Blackness and Value: Seeing Double . Mark Twain and the Novel: The Double-Cross of Authority . Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine . Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture . . Sublime Enjoyment: On the Perverse Motive in American Literature GEN DERS, RACES, AND RELIGIOUS CULTURES IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY, – R AC H E L B L AU D U P L E S S I S Temple University The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom The Edinb