Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofJewish American Literature
- The Cambridge History ofJewish American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Book part
- Introduction
- Part I New World Encounters
- Part II Genres: Adopting, Adapting, Reinventing
- Part III Place and Peoplehood: Redefining “Here” and “There”
- Part IV Creating Fields
- Part V New Perspectives
- 25 Jews on America’s Racial Map
- 26 Gender Poetics in Jewish American Poetry
- 27 Performance: Queerly Jewish/Jewishly Queer in the American Theater
- 28 Jewish American Comic Books and Graphic Novels
- 29 Jewish American Popular Culture
- 30 Jewish Humor in America
- 31 Since 2000
- Bibliography
- Index
26 - Gender Poetics in Jewish American Poetry
from Part V - New Perspectives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2015
Edited by
Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofJewish American Literature
- The Cambridge History ofJewish American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Book part
- Introduction
- Part I New World Encounters
- Part II Genres: Adopting, Adapting, Reinventing
- Part III Place and Peoplehood: Redefining “Here” and “There”
- Part IV Creating Fields
- Part V New Perspectives
- 25 Jews on America’s Racial Map
- 26 Gender Poetics in Jewish American Poetry
- 27 Performance: Queerly Jewish/Jewishly Queer in the American Theater
- 28 Jewish American Comic Books and Graphic Novels
- 29 Jewish American Popular Culture
- 30 Jewish Humor in America
- 31 Since 2000
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter shows how Jewish women writing poetry in the United States figured a gender poetics. It investigates how six poets Penina Moise, Adah Isaacs Menken, Emma Lazarus, Celia Dropkin, Adrienne Rich, and Marge Piercy shaped language and form to embody the meanings of sex, gender, and Jewishness in poetry. As a Jewish poet, Lazarus answers Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's unselfconsciously Christian perspective on the obsolescence of Jews in America with a Jewish poetics that asserts the persistence of an ongoing tradition that is alive. The liturgical poetics, reconfiguring both gender and Judaism, circles back to the Americanizing Jewish hymns that Moise composed in English in a Protestant stanza in the early nineteenth century. Rich reluctantly allows the ideas behind Jewish peoplehood to enter her poems, and the few words from Jewish languages that enter with these ideas are symbolic and unglossed.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature , pp. 525 - 546Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015