Date of Award
5-2009
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
College/School
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Department/Program
English
Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair
Art Simon
Committee Member
Tom Benediktsson
Committee Member
Sharon Lewis
Abstract
Modern American poet, Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) launched her half- century career in the thirties, a decade marked by an economic crisis in the United States, the rising threat of fascism abroad, and, consequently, by a politically-charged literary culture. Although Rukeyser’s deep engagement with social issues identified her from the start as a poet of the left, she maintained her political and artistic autonomy throughout the decade to shape a highly individualistic radical feminist aesthetic. My analysis of Rukeyser’s three collections from the 1930s: Theory of Flight (1935), U.S. 1 (1938), and A Turning Wind (1939) considers how the poet embraces, transforms, and disrupts the leftist literary conventions and social ideas of the period to merge her leftist and feminist impulses. These texts, I argue, are concerned with joining issues of politics and social change with issues of identity and feminism for a broader understanding of what activist poetry can accomplish. I read the three works within the context of Depression-era feminism to consider how they advance the poet’s idiosyncratic feminist social vision where politics is deeply connected to the personal and female agency is a key component in social reform.
File Format
Recommended Citation
Hubschman, Janis, "A Feminist Revolution on the Popular Front : Muriel Rukeyser's 1930s Poetry" (2009). Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects. 1170.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/etd/1170