Tracing Amy Levy's modernist poetry: From the mapped patterns to the liminal spaces

This dissertation investigates Amy Levy, a late nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish poet, and reveals the Modernist occupations of her verse. Amy Levy lives and writes at the literary and historical juncture where Victorianism and Modernism have intersected in the 1880's England. She is acknowledged as a Victorian poet, whose verse is evaluated as a direct reflection of her emotions, private and social life. However, this study demonstrates how her verse embodies the Modernist approach from her early career onwards. The specific reason for Levy's association with Modernist aesthetics is cited her focus on the situational and relational understandings of the character by portraying her poetic speakers in multiple, socially fragmented and liminal identities. To provide clear implications of Levy's Modernism, first of all, this study scrutinises the nineteenth century foundations of Modernist cultural revolution. It places the main dimensions of Victorian mentality over against Modernism to identify issues that later came to be seen as relevant to the development of Levy's Modernist awareness. The second chapter provides some poetical context for the study. It considers the place of the late nineteenth-century poetry within Modernist aesthetics because Amy Levy belongs to this tradition of the nineteenth-century women poets. The third chapter focuses on the turning points of Amy Levy's life, which contribute to the heightening of her consciousness and her engagement with London's radical literary personalities. The fourth chapter examines Levy's poetic strategies to surface her Modernist aesthetics and poetic quality. After discussing her literary tradition, public persona and her Modernist writing techniques, the last chapter examines Levy's poems from all three verse collections. It scrutinises Levy's representation of female identity as multiple, varied and liminal in her verse as the last ground of her association with Modernism. As a result, this study reveals that Amy Levy is a Modernist poet instead of Victorian from her early career onwards. She defies Victorian mapped patterns of female subjectivity by referring to the multiplicity, instability and liminality of modern woman identity. By doing so, this dissertation contributes to the understanding of the importance of the late nineteenth century women's writing to Modernism, which has long been neglected on the basis of self-centered sentimentalism.