Open AccessBeat women poets and writers: countercultural urban geographies and feminist avant-garde poetics
Author(s) -
Isabel Castelao-Gómez
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of english studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.115
H-Index - 4
eISSN - 1695-4300
pISSN - 1576-6357
DOI - 10.18172/jes.2816
Subject(s) - poetics , poetry , literary criticism , negotiation , literature , art , criticism , aesthetics , beat (acoustics) , feminism , sociology , gender studies , social science , physics , acoustics
The work of Beat women poets and their contribution to the Beat canon was neglected for decades until the late nineties. This study presents a critical appreciation of early Beat women poets and writers’ impact on contemporary US literature drawing from theoretical tools provided by feminist literary and poetry criticism and gender studies on geography. The aim is to situate this female literary community, in specific the one of late 1950s and 1960s in New York, within the Beat generation and to analyze the characteristics of their cultural and literary phenomena, highlighting two of their most important contributions from the point of view of gender, cultural and literary studies: their negotiation of urban geographies and city space as bohemian women and writers, and their revision of Beat aesthetics through a feminist avant-garde poetics.