In Plain Sight Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry and the Problem of Literary History

In Plain Sight explores how the poetry of nineteenth-century American women that was once so visible within American culture could have, with the exception of that by Emily Dickinson, so thoroughly disappeared from literary history. By investigating erasure not merely as something that was done to these women but as the result of the conventions that once made the circulation of their poetry possible in the first place, this volume offers the first book-length analysis of the conventions of nineteenth-century American women's poetry. While each of the chapters focuses on a specific convention, taken together they tell the complicated story of nineteenth-century American women's poetry, tracing the spaces within literary culture where it lived and thrived, the spaces from which it was always in the process of vanishing. By reclaiming these conventions as a constitutive part of nineteenth-century American women's poetry, this book asks readers to take seriously the work these women produced and the role their work might play in remapping American literary history.

Alexandra Socarides, Associate Professor of English, University of Missouri

Alexandra Socarides is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, where she teaches nineteenth-century American literature and culture, women's writing, and the history of poetics. Her first book, Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. She is the co-editor (with Jennifer Putzi) of A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and co-editor (with Michael Cohen) of Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Volume 7: Poetry. Her articles and essays have appeared in, among other places, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.