"Queer theory," asserts Linda Garber, "alternately buries and vilifies lesbian feminism, missing its valuable insights and ignoring its rich contributions." Rejecting the either/or choice between lesbianism and queer theory, she favors an inclusive approach that defies current factionalism. In an eloquent challenge to the privileging of queer theory in the academy, Garber calls for recognition of the historical—and intellectually significant—role of lesbian poets as theorists of lesbian identity and activism. The connections, Garber shows, are most clearly seen when looking at the pivotal work of working-class lesbians/lesbians of color whose articulations of multiple, simultaneous identity positions and activist politics both belong to lesbian feminism and presage queer theory. Identity Poetics includes a critical overview of recent historical writing about the women's and lesbian-feminist movements of the 1970s; discussions of the works of Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Anzaldúa; and, finally, a chapter on the rise and hegemony of queer theory within lesbigay studies.

The book reveals the historical change in the function of the generic form of the fairy tale: at the beginning of the twentieth century, fairy tales are no longer written or read for their stimulus to the imagination or their nostalgia towards past times, but with a political end in view: to define a nation’s identity meant to justify and support claims to a unitary state (Romania) or an independent state (Ireland). As such, this book investigates the interweave of poetics and politics at the time of the rise of modernist nationalism at the margins of Europe.

Second generation of Irish Modernists has reconstructed not only the grand narratives of Irishness but the language in which an Irish 'identity' has been rehearsed. In subverting and relativising these discourses, the postmodernist poetry imagines a new and contemporary Ireland, open to the cross-currents of European and international semiotics.

This new study of American poetry views the poetics of Ezra Pound and his avant-garde followers in an entirely new light. Both Romanticism and Modernism have variously been seen as revolutionary or retrograde, narcissistic or self-abnegating. This interdisciplinary work looks past distinctions between schools and styles to reveal an unexpected link between poets' spiritual aspirations, formal experiments, and political convictions. Along the way, it sheds light on the complex relationship between art and society. Beginning with a fresh reading of Emerson's elusive philosophy, the author identifies the tension between Romanticism and Liberalism as a source of Modernist poetics. Critics have dissected the eccentric forms of avant-garde American poetry but have never adequately explained its scrupulous avoidance of abstraction and elimination of the poet from the poem. Drawing extensively on classic and contemporary theory, this book reveals postwar poetics, particularly the epics Paterson and The Maximus Poems, as the fulfillment of a longstanding Romantic social vision, one which seeks to invest Liberal social structures with a transcendental core. This book is a valuable source for scholars with an interest in Emerson and Pound Studies, the intellectual traditions leading to Modernism, and the Objectivist and Black Mountain schools of American poetry.

This comprehensive chronological anthology includes 58 essays on poetry by 53 poets. Starting with James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost, the book offers diverse and often conflicting accounts of the nature and function of poetry. The collection includes rarely anthologized essays by Jack Spicer, Rhina Espaillat, Anne Stevenson, and Ron Silliman, as well as work by some of the finest younger critics in America, including William Logan, Alice Fulton, and Christian Wiman.

Edited by poets about poets, "Contemporary American Poetry" is a chronologically organized anthology covering major poets born after 1920.

The author interviewed both poets in the course of her work. The poetry is analyzed in detail, seeking to understand how the poets look at themselves in terms of race and gender.

In focusing on the poetic treatment of self and literary form in Keats and Shelley, Mark Sandy shows how using Nietzsche's philosophy to illuminate Keats's correspondence and Shelley's A Defence of Poetry provides a conceptual basis for a comparative reading of the poets. Using key ideas from Nietzsche, Sandy explores Keats's Endymion and Shelley's Alastor as redefinitions of the romance genre. Further, he suggests that in their redescription of romance, Keats and Shelley discovered a radical mode of subjectivity that is present in Keats's major odes and Shelley's lyrical poetry as a conflict among poetic identity, art, and existence. In Sandy's reading, Shelley's Adonais and Keats's The Eve of St Mark emerge as diverse meditations on crises of posthumous reputation and future audience, whereas Keats's Hyperion fragments and Shelley's The Triumph of Life resolve these anxieties over authorial posterity by entrusting the reader with a new form of poetical self.