Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature
Series Editors: Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley
This series provides accessible yet provocative introductions to a wide range of literatures. The volumes will initiate and deepen the reader's understanding of key literary movements, periods and genres, and consider debates that inform the past, present and future of literary study. Resources such as glossaries of key terms and details of archives and internet sites are also provided, making each volume a comprehensive critical guide.
Women's Poetry
Jo Gill
This guide examines the production and reception of poetry by a range of women writers - predominantly although not exclusively writing in English - from Sappho through Anne Bradstreet and Emily Bronte to Sylvia Plath, Eavan Boland and Susan Howe.
Women's Poetry offers a thoroughgoing study of key texts, poets and issues, analysing commonalities and differences across diverse writers, periods, and forms. The book is alert, throughout, to the diversity of women's poetry. Close readings of selected texts are combined with a discussion of key theories and critical practices, and students are encouraged to think about women's poetry in the light of debates about race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and regional and national identity. The book opens with a chronology followed by a comprehensive Introduction which outlines various approaches to reading women's poetry. Seven chapters follow, and a Conclusion and section of useful resources close the book.
Key Features
* Wide-ranging and flexible in scope, giving detailed consideration to widely-taught poets, texts, periods and issues
* Introduces themes, questions and perspectives applicable to the work of other less familiar writers
* Encourages informed discussion of the difficulties of defining a discrete genre of 'women's poetry'
* Offers valuable introductory and supplementary guidance for students

Jo Gill is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at The University of Exeter. Author of Anne Sexton: Confessional Poetry and Contemporary Poetics (forthcoming, University of Florida Press). Editor of Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays (forthcoming, Routledge, 2005) and The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath (Cambridge UP, forthcoming, 2005).