Isabelle Stuart

Supervisor: Professor Michael Whitworth 

Research Interests: modern and contemporary literature, poetry performance, modernism, poetics, metre, scansion, Victorian poetry, sound studies. 

Doctoral Research: My thesis examines the influence of verse recitation practice and theory on the development of modernist poetics from 1900 to 1950. Modernist poetry is usually characterised as visually orientated, and there has been little attempt to probe the material conditions of modernist poetry performance despite detailed historicising of the modernist poem on the page. While print did play a crucial and fascinating role in shaping modernist poetics, this detailed attention to visual coding has obscured the extent to which poets like Yeats, Pound and Eliot always also intended for their poetry to be read aloud. I am interested in defining the relationship between elements of these modernist poetry recitation cultures and key features of modernist poetics, such as impersonality, free verse and the fascination with verse drama.