Eva Isherwood-Wallace

'Sculpture and Silence: Laura Riding and her Female Contemporaries'

My research situates the modernist poet Laura Riding in relation to her female contemporaries, and considers her work in terms of the sculptural. In investigating her sculptural poetics, I explore her preoccupation with silence as both a condition of visual art and a paradoxical impulse within poetry. Her engagement with sculpture as both art form and (perhaps literal) poetic model reveals her connections to a wider network of female poets such as Stein, Mina Loy, H.D. and Djuna Barnes. While focussing on sculpture and silence, I consider the invisibility and silencing of female poets in the early twentieth century.

Modernism, Gender, Poetics, Philosophy, Aesthetics