Reading Elizabeth Bishop
An Edinburgh Companion
Edited by Jonathan Ellis
Celebrating Elizabeth Bishop as an international writer with allegiances to various countries and national traditions, this collection of essays explores how Bishop moves between literal geographies like Nova Scotia, New England, Key West and Brazil and more philosophical categories like home and elsewhere, human and animal, insider and outsider.
AcknowledgementsContributorsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Incompatible Bishops?, Jonathan Ellis
PART I: IDENTITY
1. Disturbances of the Archive: Repetition and Memory in Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetry, Linda Anderson
2. ‘Manuelzinho’, Brazil, and Identity Politics, Vidyan Ravinthiran
3. Elizabeth Bishop’s Immersion in ‘The Riverman’, Melissa Zeiger
4. ‘The Colour of the World Altogether’: Elizabeth Bishop’s Diffraction Patterns, Amy Waite
PART II: THOUGHT
5. ‘I Take Off My Hat’: Elizabeth Bishop’s Comedy of Self-Revelation, Rachel Trousdale
6. ‘This heaped-up autobiography’: The Role of Religion in Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetry, Marcel Inhoff
7. Elizabeth Bishop: Life Change and Poetic Transformation, Angelica Nuzzo
8. ‘Swerving as I swerve’: Elizabeth Bishop’s Fugitive Empathy, Sarah Kennedy
9. Repetition and Poetic Process: Bishop’s Nagging Thoughts, Deryn Rees-Jones
PART III: POETRY
10. ‘Solid Cuteness’: Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Simplicity, Jess Cotton
11. Elizabeth Bishop and ‘a bad case of the Threes’, Katrina Mayson
12. The Case of the Falling S: Elizabeth Bishop, Visual Poetry, and the International Avant-Garde, Susan Rosenbaum
13. ‘The Moose’ as Movie: Elizabeth Bishop as Screenwriter, J T Welsch
PART IV: PROSE
14. Migrating Letters, Sophie Baldock
15. Patterns of Time and the Maternal in the Short Stories of Elizabeth Bishop and Katherine Mansfield, Laura Helyer
16. ‘Thinking with One’s Feelings’: Elizabeth Bishop’s Literary Criticism, Michael O’Neill
PART V: OTHER PLACES, OTHER PEOPLE
17. ‘Private faces in public places’: Bishop’s Triptych of Cold War Washington, Heather Treseler
18. Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Islandology, James McCorkle
19. Elizabeth Bishop and Audre Lorde: Two Views of ‘Florida’ in the Global South Atlantic, Marvin Campbell
20. Innocents Abroad? Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill Overseas, Ben Leubner
21. Elizabeth Bishop in Ireland: From Seamus Heaney to Colm Tóibín, Jonathan Ellis
22. Elizabeth Bishop at the End of the Rainbow, Stephanie Burt
Index
The volume includes five essays, each quite different from the other, that should be classified as essential Bishop reading.
Perhaps you thought you knew Elizabeth Bishop’s work: I did. This book proves me gloriously wrong. These essays present a Bishop brilliantly and subtly dynamised for the twenty-first century—a funnier, sharper, messier, more mysterious and more profound poet than even her longtime admirers might have thought. Informed by recent archival discoveries, ongoing editorial work and critical élan, Jonathan Ellis and his contributors powerfully and variously re-open "the case of Bishop", with ramifying implications for poetics more generally.
