Alice Entwistle

Broadly, my research interests lie in 20th century and contemporary Anglophone poetics, gender and literary geo-cultures. Specifically I am interested in cultural-political connections which link poetry, place and space; the geo-political implications which inflect the construction and performance of voice and identity, and in the aesthetics of textual expression. Much of my published work to date has concentrated on the expression and legacy of the later twentieth century woman poet, especially those working in or identifying with the complex cultural mileu of Wales, before and after devolution, but I have also written on a range of English-language contemporary poets, male and female, writing out of Scotland, Ireland and England. My doctoral work (on mid-century/postwar American poetics) catalysed my persisting interest in shorter and sequential lyric forms, the nature of literary influence, experimental poetry, and letters and letter-writing. More recently I have been exploring the suggestive crossover between textual and certain kinds of visual expression, the performative theory and practice of creative criticism and, perhaps most challengingly, the cultural-political/aesthetic implications of experimental text-art, producing experimental written and text-art outputs in collaboration with colleagues working in literary criticism and the visual arts. These experiences have given rise to a more general interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration as a route to creative expression, and in the extent to which text, in various forms, might serve to support and foster wider social inclusiveness in, and broader engagement with, public artforms.    

Research supervision:

I would be interested in supervising graduate research on a range of questions concerning late 19th, 20th and/or 21st century British and/or American poetry and poetics. These might include, but need not be confined to, issues raised by the work of British, American, Irish, Scottish and/or Welsh women poets and women’s poetry; poetry and influence; women poets and the tradition; poetry and performance; the poetic voice and ventriloquism; poetry and domesticity; poetry, gender and nationhood; and women’s poetry in Wales 1900-present. If you would like to discuss a research proposal informally and/or in confidence, please feel free to contact me.

Current research activity:

Since the publication of A History of Twentieth Century British Women’s Poetry (CUP 2005) co-authored with Jane Dowson, I have been examining the poetry of women writers based, variously, in Scotland and Wales. A critical monograph, Poetry, Geography,Gender: Contemporary women rewriting Wales’ was published by University of Wales Press in 2013. Some of the interviews on which the latter work was based were collated and appeared the following year as In Her Own Voice: Women talking poetry and Wales (Seren Publishing, 2014). I am currently completing the first critical monograph to address work of the bi-lingual Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis for the University of Wales Press. Shorter treatments also in preparation consider, respectively, the link between form and emotion in some recent poetry by Carol Ann Duffy, and Thomas Hardy's five-line stanza.