Reclaiming the book-object: appropriated texts in 21st century poetry

Reclaiming the Book-Object considers acts of literary appropriation in contemporary poetry—where one document, a book or series of poems, is transformed into a new of book of poems by means of erasure, editing, and/or revisioning. Recent decades have seen a resurgence of such visual and poetic appropriations, and special attention is given to contemporary rewritings of Emily Dickinson’s poems and William Shakespeare’s sonnets. As the 21st century offers new modes and concerns of production and reproduction—emphasizing relationships between form and content, process and product, past and present—these present-day book-length appropriations exaggerate their reliance on a pre-existing poetic text, revealing a decisive shift in basic qualities of composition and authorship. Too, the physical object of the book often plays a key role in these new works, further complicating boundaries of the poetic act. The dissertation includes an introduction, ""Claiming the Book-Object,"" and three essays: ""Reading THE MS OF M Y KIN: Janet Holmes and Emily Dickinson,"" ""Revising the Ultimate Source Text: Contemporary Appropriations of Shakespeare's Sonnets,"" and ""Coda: 'Destroying' the Text to Create the Poem."" An original book of poems, (aviary), is the final component of this dissertation.