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Hemans and her American Heirs

Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry and National Identity

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Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian

Abstract

Although Felicia Hemans never fulfilled her dying desire to compose a ‘noble and complete work … which might permanently take its place as the work of a British poetess’,1 no fully satisfying account of nineteenth-century poetry’s contributions to the construction of English national identity, and particularly feminine identity, can afford to ignore her work. This essay will argue that the same may well be true for poetic constructions of national identity in the United States. For paradoxically, England’s most famous female patriotic poet was also a beloved writer of American patriotic verse. Indeed, her works helped to inspire and authorize an explicitly, even vehemently public and political strain of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Georgia, USA

    Tricia Lootens (Associate Professor of English)

Authors
  1. Tricia Lootens
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

    Isobel Armstrong (Professor of English) (Professor of English)

  2. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Virginia Blain (Associate Professor of English) (Associate Professor of English)

Copyright information

© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Lootens, T. (1999). Hemans and her American Heirs. In: Armstrong, I., Blain, V. (eds) Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27021-7_12

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