Donnell, Alison (1994) Cultural and gender politics in a neglected archive of Jamaican women's poetry : Una Marson and her Creole contemporaries. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This thesis considers the gender and cultural politics of selected Jamaican
women's poetry published during the first half of the twentieth century and
seeks to establish that an approach to this poetry sensitive to these issues will
illuminate aspects of their work previously neglected by canonical and colonial
modes of interpretation. The central interest of this thesis is the poetry of Una
Marson, a black woman poet whose work has been critically neglected and
devalued to date. My project is to read Marson's work in some detail, and to
explore to what extent her poetry, which often works within colonial models and
with conventional notions of feminine fulfilment, employs received aesthetic
and ideological paradigms both strategically and subversively. In the belief
that critics of Jamaican women's writing should be as attentive to the gender
and cultural politics of their ways of reading, as of the texts they wish to read,
the first chapter of this thesis engages in a sustained analysis of theoretical
positions and attempts to map out the various problems and possibilities
which critical discourses present in relation to this material. The second
chapter examines the various social and literary contexts in which Jamaican
poetry was produced and received during this period, and the third chapter
looks in more detail at contemporary notions of aesthetic and cultural forms.
The fourth and fifth chapters are structured aromd close textual readings
which explore the variety and complexity of Marson's, and her Creole
contemporaries', poetic engagement with the issues of cultural and gender
identities. The thesis concludes that Marson's poetry questions dominant
notions both of identity and of aesthetics, and consequently that her poetry
offers an example of Jamaican literary expression which moves beyond the
nationalization of consciousness which has come to mark the literary
achievement of this period.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Jamaican poetry -- 20th century -- Women authors -- History and criticism, Marson, Una -- Criticism and interpretation
Official Date:	January 1994
Dates:	Date Event January 1994 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Centre for Caribbean Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Dabydeen, David
Extent:	iii, 252 leaves
Language:	eng

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