Rita Doves Cosmopolitanism

Download or read book Rita Dove's Cosmopolitanism written by Malin Pereira and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize-winner and former poet laureate of the United States, Rita Dove has written prolifically since the early 1970s. In this, the first full-length critical study of her entire body of work by an American scholar, Malin Pereira traces the development of Dove's literary voice, looking at the ways she combines racial specificity with the perspective of the unraced universal. Pereira examines Dove's poetry, fiction, drama, and literary criticism closely and chronologically, charting her path through the racially charged culture wars of the 1970s and 1980s. She demonstrates how Dove eventually transcended racial protocols that threaten to define her work and moves into a nomadic poetic articulation of her cosmopolitan identity. As Pereira addresses Rita Dove's cosmopolitanism, she also examines the thematic concerns that reoccur in Dove's work - themes, such as incest, miscegenation, nomadism, the blues, and patriarchal oppression.