Contesting voices : authenticity, performance and identity in contemporary British poetry

Abstract

This thesis examines the importance attributed to voice in contemporary British poetics. It considers how self-reflexive engagements with voice negotiate prominent debates about form, politics, and identity. Focusing on the work of nine poets from the 1970s to the twenty-first century, the thesis contests the lingering critical dichotomy between an avant-garde attack of the unified lyric voice and literary expressions of marginalised voices. It argues that while a formally disruptive aesthetic often aims to complicate representation and the idea of a stable identity, this does not prevent it from expressing silenced histories and unofficial voices effectively.

Analysing the different investments made in voice both as a trope and as a technology of the text, the thesis proposes a more complex relation between voice and experimentalism than is sometimes assumed in existing critical narratives. While voice is a much invoked term, its precise meanings and implications to different poets remains under-theorised. A consideration of these meanings foregrounds the diversity of poetic practices and critiques inherent in contemporary innovative work. Poetic engagements with voice as a signifier for authoriality, authenticity, and selfhood, alongside the more literal voice of performance are all examined, and these are framed within shifting narratives of Britishness. The thesis argues that the intense preoccupation with the meanings of voice is partly a poetic response to new forms of political power and an articulation of changing models of gendered, sexual, class, and diasporic identities in Britain over the last three decades. It also suggests that thematic and formal explorations of voice are a way of assessing the current status and communicative potential of poetry, and of proposing new ways of claiming a public.

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