Crediting Toru Dutt's Poetic Labor: "Our Casuarina Tree" and Paradise Lost.
Calls to decolonize the Victorian canon have contributed to increased critical interest in Indian poet Toru Dutt. Our current scholarly approaches have proffered nuanced evaluations of the relationship between colony and metropole in Dutt's English-language poetry. But admirable efforts to center Du...
| Publicado en: | Victorian Poetry Vol. 63; no. 2; pp. 135 - 164 |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Literary Criticism |
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Johns Hopkins University Press
Summer2025
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=194992152&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 194992152 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00425206 VCP jtl: Victorian Poetry issn: 00425206 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Summer2025 vid: 63 iid: 2 pid: 226 pub: Johns Hopkins University Press artinfo: ui: 194992152 10.1353/vp.2025.a994072 ppf: 135 ppct: 29 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 933KB tig: atl: Crediting Toru Dutt's Poetic Labor: "Our Casuarina Tree" and Paradise Lost. aug: au: Davenport, Emma su: Paradise Lost (Poem : Milton) Women poets Canon (Literature) Paradise Decolonization Poetry (Literary form) Postcolonial literature Literary criticism Poets Milton, John, 1608-1674 Victorian (Literary period) sug: subj: Paradise Lost (Poem : Milton) Women poets Canon (Literature) Paradise Decolonization Poetry (Literary form) Postcolonial literature Literary criticism Poets Milton, John, 1608-1674 Victorian (Literary period) keyword: " "Our Casuarina Tree labor Milton Paradise Lost postcolonial Toru Dutt ab: Calls to decolonize the Victorian canon have contributed to increased critical interest in Indian poet Toru Dutt. Our current scholarly approaches have proffered nuanced evaluations of the relationship between colony and metropole in Dutt's English-language poetry. But admirable efforts to center Dutt's voice in scholarly readings of her work have deprioritized close reading of the English texts with which Dutt was in conversation. The effect of this approach has been to obscure the complexity of Dutt's poetic engagement with her English referents. This essay offers a Miltonic reading of Dutt's most anthologized poem, "Our Casuarina Tree," to show how attending to Paradise Lost as closely as Dutt did makes available new readings of her work. While a conventional interpretation of "Our Casuarina Tree" posits the poem as a meditation on the poet's fraught dual identity, I read the poem's deployment of Miltonic form, imagery, and thematics as a reflection on feminine labor and the work of the woman poet. Training a close eye on Milton's epic, I argue, helps us more fully credit Dutt's own poetic labor. Ultimately, I suggest that decolonizing our analytic frames requires enabling colonial poetry itself to direct our readerly attention. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Literary Criticism src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Victorian Poetry is the property of Johns Hopkins University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Victorian Poetry holder: Johns Hopkins University Press dt: @attributes: year: 2025 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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