Stenke, Katarina ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4006-3826 (2026) “Suspend the Sigh, dear Sir”: politics of voice and address in two elegies by Phillis Wheatley Peters. In: McCaskill, Barbara, Narain, Mona and Robbins, Sarah Ruffing, (eds.) The Lives, Writings, and Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. ISBN 978-1399551809 (In Press)

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Abstract

This chapter illuminates the politics of voice and address in two important elegies by Phillis Wheatley Peters. Although her elegies have been compellingly analysed in relation to Early American contexts, here I draw on theorisations of poetic voice and address to foreground her deployment of gendered elegiac conventions long used in anglophone Atlantic World literature as a means of political expression, and which depended on received conceptualisations of Christian death. Following bell hooks’ account of poetic voice as plural and audience-dependent, setting Wheatley Peters’ elegies in the context of neoclassical Protestant poetics, and reading them against her writing of death in correspondence with her friend and fellow African American Arbour Tanner, I show how these elegies for eminent Bostonians re-code a set of value-laden tropes that together produce a multivalent, gender ambiguous voice. These inherited features thus contribute to Wheatley Peters’ poetic agency even as their conventional political meanings are undone by her articulation of them. In this way, her elegies challenge the very categories and attributes by which Boston’s ruling elite distinguished itself, and dissolve eighteenth-century white colonial-settler identities into the “undistinguished” “millions” of the world’s dead. Christian death, as occasion, provides both context and alibi for this subversion.

Katarina Stenke, ‘“Suspend the Sight, dear “: Politics of Voice and Address in Two Elegies by Phillis
Wheatley Peters,’ in The Lives, Writings, and Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters, eds. Barbara McCaskill,
Mona Narain, and Sarah Ruffing Robbins (EUP, forthcoming 2026). Book currently in production, expected
publication mid-2026.

Item Type:	Book Section
Additional Information:	Excerpt from anonymous peer reviewer reader report: “This book will be welcomed by scholars and those who draw on the inspiration of Wheatley Peters’ life and writings and will set the standard for the academic study of her work for years to come…. The editors have assembled a who’s-who of scholars, artists, cultural critics and archivists that represent the best in their fields…. The book is also truly multi-disciplinary, featuring literary, cultural, historical/archival and biographical treatments alongside work by sculptors, and playwrights. The progression from ‘Representing Life Experience’ to ‘Literary Criticism’ to ‘Afterlives and Communities’ works well to frame the collection as larger than the more traditional treatments of Wheatley Peters as a literary figure. . . . [The editors and contributors] bring Wheatley Peters out of the archives and into contemporary conversations with creative and digital arts, new literary theories, and the intellectual life of conferences and festivals dedicated to her.”
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Phillis Wheatley Peters, eighteenth century, Atlantic World literature, neoclassical Protestant poetics, politics of voice and address, poetic voice and address, death, gender, elegies, identities
Subjects:	J Political Science > JA Political science (General) P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
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
Related URLs:	http://www.amazon.co.uk/Writings-Legacie...
Last Modified:	19 Jun 2026 16:00
URI:	https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/53791

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