“The house / of herself”: reading place and space in the poetry of Anne Sexton

Gill, J. (2016) “The house / of herself”: reading place and space in the poetry of Anne Sexton. In: Golden, A. (ed.) The Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton. University Press of Florida: Gainesville, pp. 17-37. ISBN 9780813062204 (doi: 10.5744/florida/9780813062204.003.0002)

Abstract

‘“The house/ of herself”: Reading Place and Space in the Poetry of Anne Sexton’ offers a reading of Anne Sexton’s poetry and prose (including short stories, unpublished lecture notes and correspondence) in light of its engagement with history and, more importantly, with historiography. The orthodox assumption that confessional poetry in general, and Sexton’s poetry in particular, has little or nothing to say about contemporary historical circumstances has been confounded of late by the work of a number of critics. This essay takes these revisionist readings of Sexton’s historical and political commitment as the starting point for a nuanced and theoretically inflected reading of her engagement not with history per se, but with historiography – or the ways in which the past has been read, understood and communicated over time.

• Item Type: Book Sections
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Gill, Professor Jo
• Authors: Gill, J.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities
• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• ISBN: 9780813062204

Related URLs

• University of Glasgow Library Catalogue