Bethany Hicok – författare

In recent years, a series of major collections of posthumous writings by Elizabeth Bishop--one of the most widely read and discussed poets of the twentieth century--have been published, profoundly affecting how we look at her life and work. The hundreds of letters, poems, and other writings in these volumes have expanded Bishop‘s published work by well over a thousand pages and placed before the public a "new" Bishop whose complexity was previously familiar to only a small circle of scholars and devoted readers. This collection of essays by many of the leading figures in Bishop studies provides a deep and multifaceted account of the impact of these new editions and how they both enlarge and complicate our understanding of Bishop as a cultural icon.

Contributors: Charles Berger, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville * Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, University of Notre Dame * Angus Cleghorn, Seneca College * Jonathan Ellis, University of Sheffield * Richard Flynn, Georgia Southern University * Lorrie Goldensohn * Jeffrey Gray, Seton Hall University * Bethany Hicok, Westminster College * George Lensing, University of North Carolina * Carmen L. Oliveira * Barbara Page, Vassar College * Christina Pugh, University of Illinois at Chicago * Francesco Rognoni, Catholic University in Milan * Peggy Samuels, Drew University * Lloyd Schwartz, University of Massachusetts, Boston * Thomas Travisano, Hartwick College * Heather Treseler, Worcester State University * Gillian White, University of Michigan

When the American poet Elizabeth Bishop arrived in Brazil in 1951 at the age of forty, she had not planned to stay, but her love affair with the Brazilian aristocrat Lota de Macedo Soares and with the country itself set her on another course, and Brazil became her home for nearly two decades. In this groundbreaking new study, Bethany Hicok offers Bishop’s readers the most comprehensive study to date on the transformative impact of Brazil on the poet’s life and art. Based on extensive archival research and travel, Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil argues that the whole shape of Bishop’s writing career shifted in response to Brazil, taking on historical, political, linguistic, and cultural dimensions that would have been inconceivable without her immersion in this vibrant South American culture.

Hicok reveals the mid-century Brazil that Bishop encountered--its extremes of wealth and poverty, its spectacular topography, its language, literature, and people--and examines the Brazilian class structures that placed Bishop and Macedo Soares at the center of the country’s political and cultural power brokers. We watch Bishop develop a political poetry of engagement against the backdrop of America’s Cold War policies and Brazil’s political revolutions. Hicok also offers the first comprehensive evaluation of Bishop’s translations of Brazilian writers and their influence on her own work. Drawing on archival sources that include Bishop’s unpublished travel writings and providing provocative new readings of the poetry, Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil is a long-overdue exploration of a pivotal phase in this great poet’s life and work.