Dwelling in Possibility - (Reading Women Writing) by Yopie Prins & Maeera Shreiber (Paperback)

About the Book

Contributors here suggest new ways of thinking and writing about poetry in light of contemporary questions about history and identity. The book covers a range of time, geography, and genre, considering poets from antiquity to the present and drawing on a variety of critical approaches--particularly the transformation of classical lyric through the figure of Sappho and the use of biblical material in women's verse. 4 illustrations. .

Book Synopsis

"Dwelling in Possibility is a splendid collaboration between poets and critics. Prins and Shreiber have interwoven sophisticated feminist critical essays with poetic meditations on genre and gender; the dialogues they set up are lyrically elegant as well as intellectually exhilarating. This collection not only sets a new standard for feminist theorizing about poetic genres, it performs the pleasures of feminist reading in all their diversity."--Mary Loeffelholz, author of Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist TheoryDwelling in Possibility cuts across conventional boundaries between critical and creative writing by featuring the work of both women poets and feminist critics as they explore and exemplify the relationship between gender and poetic genres. The contributors suggest new ways of thinking and writing about poetry in light of contemporary questions about history and identity. Most of the contributions are published here for the first time.

Review Quotes

A lovely book.... This anthology is immensely erudite, detailed, precise, and thoughtful.... Every essay in this collection is a solid meal, nothing is skippable or skimmable.

--Meryl Altman "The Women's Review of Books"

The powerful insight of this 370-page collection of women's writing is that the participation of women poets in the public sphere cannot be measured adequately unless feminist genre theory learns how to 'open the borders'--to recognize how generic hybridity has helped to define cultural and political movements and to build connections between academics and other communities, as the book itself exemplifies.

-- "Contemporary Literature"

About the Author

Yopie Prins is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Maeera Shreiber is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California.