Claire Buck
Professor of English
Office: Meneely 312
Phone: 286-3604
Email: cbuck@wheatoncollege.edu
Degrees
Ph.D., B.A., University of Kent at Canterbury
Main Interests
Modernism and modernity; Contemporary poetry; Feminist theory; History of Sexuality.
Research Interests
My present research has taken shape from work I undertook for two articles on women?s writing and the 1914-1918 World War, one published and one in press. In the first article, ??Still Some Obstinate Emotion Remains?: The Meanings of Service in the Fiction of Radclyffe Hall? I examine the role of the Great War in the English writer Radclyffe Hall?s post-war attempts to connect lesbian sexuality to English patriotism. In the second, ??This Other Eden?: Homoeroticism and the Great War in the Early Poetry of H.D. and Radclyffe Hall,? I compare the early poetry of Hall to that of the modernist American expatriate H.D., arguing that the war creates a new discursive context in which earlier paradigms for the literary representation of homosexuality and other dissident sexualities acquire new and contradictory meanings connected to nationalism. My book, "Dissident Sexualities, English Landscape, and the Great War" will pursue the questions raised in these articles by focusing on the intersection of topography, English nationalism, and sexuality in writing before and during the Great War.
Teaching Interests
Modern British fiction; contemporary poetry; postcolonial literature and theory (special interests in Irish and Caribbean); literary and critical theory.
Other Interests
Member of the Steering Committee for the Southern New England Consortium on Race and Ethnicity (SNECORE)
Student Projects
I have worked with numerous students on projects in the areas of Caribbean Literature, Irish Literature, and the history of sexuality.
Selected Publications, Creative Work or Performances
The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature, editor, Bloomsbury Publishing and Prentice Hall, 1992
H.D. and Freud: Bisexuality and a Feminine Discourse, Harvester Wheatsheaf and St. Martin's Press, 1991
¡†Women¡Ùs Literature of the Great War,¡Ö Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Great War, ed. Vincent Sherry, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming Spring 2003.
"¡ÙThis Other Eden¡Ù: Homoeroticism and Nationalism in the Early Poetry of H.D. and Radclyffe Hall." Forthcoming in Leslie Lewis and Ann Ardis eds. Women in Modernity. Johns Hopkins University Press, in press and due Spring 2002.
"Introduction," Janet Montefiore, Feminism and Poetry, in press, due Fall Winter 2001.
¡†Engendering the Political: American Motherhood in the Writings of Lydia Sigourney,¡Ö Paragraph,Edinburgh University Press, Spring 1999
"'Still Some Obstinate Emotion Remains': Radclyffe Hall and the Meanings of Service," Women's Fiction and the First World War eds. Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate, Oxford University Press, 1997.
"Contemporary Women's Poetry in the British Women's Movement," in Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Criticism ed. James Acheson and Romana Huk, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1996.