Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove's Poetry, Fiction, and Drama

by Therese Steffen

Overview

Rita Dove (b. 1952) was elected Poet Laureate—the first ever African-American to hold the position—in 1993, in recognition of work that combines racially sensitive observation with searing and immediate personal experience. She is best known for her substantial body of poetry, although she has also been recognized for her many accomplishments in drama and fiction, written in both German and English. Crossing Color, written by a well-known Americanist in the European community, is the first full-length critical study offering a comprehensive biographic and literary portrait of Rita Dove and her work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195134407
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/12/2001
Series:	W.E.B. Du Bois Institute
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

University of Basel

Editorial Reviews

"Rita Dove is one of the great American poets of our generation, and Therese Steffen's book helps us to understand why. Combining a nuanced and subtle sense of the language of poetry with a deep familiarity with the canon, Steffen has made a magnificent contribution to students of American Literature, African American Studies, and Women's Studies. Her book is a model of literary criticism at its most useful, and readable."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

"Therese Steffen brings to the analysis of Rita Dove's work something that few readers do-namely, an encyclopedic awareness of the context of classical and Germanic literary references to apply to interpretation. There is a wealth of meaning which she is able to infer from the works, and which few American readers have the background to know. Therese Steffen's interpretations will add to worldwide stature of the works, since by analyzing them in the way she does, she validates the universality of Dove's oeuvre."—James Kohn, San Francisco State University

"Therese Steffen undertakes an admirable exploration of Afro-American subjectivity as a phenomenological way of being in the world. At the same time her subtle readings offer the first sustained critical overview of Rita Dove's work."—Elisabeth Bronfen, University of Zurich

"Steffen provides an excellent conceptual framework in which she reworks the problematics of space in relation to Dove, and she knows how to provide the background data needed to understand Dove's frequently allusive poetry. The reader is most grateful for such easy accessibility, and comes to realize only in retrospect that difficult theoretical issues have just been discussed in a very matter-of-fact way. Crossing Color deserves to be particularly recommended on this score."—Wlad Godzich, University of California, Santa Cruz

"Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove's Poetry, Fiction, and Drama is Therese Seffren's testament to this writer's "crossover" ability. Dove's crossings include those of color, gender, culture, continental boundaries, and genres. . . . Noteworthy is the study of Through the Ivory Gate as a work of "artistic enspacement" drawing on Greek tragedy for its modes of simultaneity and reversibility."—American Literary Scholarship

From the Publisher