Stenke, Katarina ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4006-3826 (2024) Phillis Wheatley Peters’ crowded elegies. In: Symposium: "Minority Identity and Religious Experience", 14th May, 2024, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK.

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Abstract

This paper explores the politics of voice and address in Boston poet Phillis Wheatley Peters’ elegies, reading a selection of her published and unpublished elegies, including a recently-attributed elegy from early in her career, in order to pinpoint the ways in which they subvert and fragment gendered, racialized, and class identities via a repertoire of neoclassical vocalizations and figures of address. I argue that death as elegiac occasion, with its multiple, often overlapping conventions of lyric lament and address, allows Wheatley Peter to multiply both her own rhetorical position as elegist and the implied addressees of her verse. The result is elegies that are crowded with voices, agencies and interpellated addresses, speaking composite, carefully differentiated political truths to their different readers.

Item Type:	Conference or Conference Paper (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Phillis Wheatley Peters, elegy, subversion, voice, rhetoric, politics, eighteenth-century poetry
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics P Language and Literature > PL Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania P Language and Literature > PS American literature
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences > School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Last Modified:	01 Jun 2026 15:49
URI:	https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/53636

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