‘Frau Freud’ and ‘Childe Rolandine’: The Postmodern Subversion of Grand Narratives in British Women’s Poetry
‘Frau Freud’ and ‘Childe Rolandine’: The Postmodern Subversion of Grand Narratives in British Women’s Poetry

Summary/Abstract: While women’s poetry of the mid-twentieth century saw a prevalence of writers embracing the Ethos of Interiority (Frances Cornford, Frances Bellerby) and the Ethos of the Numinous (Dorothy Wellesley, Ruth Pitter, Kathleen Raine, Anne Ridler, Elizabeth Jennings and Joy Scovell), with a few poets showing traits of the Ethos of Anonymity (Sheila Wingfield), the Fantastic proved a powerful Ethos for women poets, some working within the Apocalyptic Mode (Edith Sitwell, Lilian Bowes Lyon, Kathleen Nott), some in the tradition of Menippean satire (Phoebe Hesketh and Stevie Smith). In their own time, the work of these latter poets proved particularly intractable to period maps and typologies of twentieth-century poetry, leading critics, anthologists and editors to define their carnivalesque, entropic, and metamorphic voices as hysterical or mad. However, these voices paved the way for subsequent generations of poets. Intimately connected with fantastic subversion, grotesque exaggeration, parody and caricature (Coelsch- Foisner 2002b: 856), and described by Bakhtin as “one of the main carriers and channels for the carnival sense of the world in literature” (Bakhtin 1984a: 113), the Menippean Mode developed into an important current in women’s poetry of the second half of the twentieth century.

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