Alumni College Fellow

Elissa Zellinger

Lyrical Strains: Lyric, Liberalism, and Women's Poetry, 1820-1920

Lyrical Strains chronicles the interdependent consolidation of the modern lyric and the liberal subject (self-enclosed, self-reliant, self-possessed) across the "long" nineteenth century. Particularly in the nineteenth-century United States, the supposed universals of liberalism were limited to white men and were, in fact, created by omitting women, the enslaved, and Native peoples. I focus on women writers and the intersections of gender with race in order to examine how these poets contested liberalism's exclusions. By engaging lyrical practices to fashion poetic selves, these women asserted their fitness for the freedoms enjoyed by full liberal subjects.

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