Coastal cosmopolitanism and modernist women poets of the transnational South

This dissertation uncovers a pathbreaking network of women poets writing during the interwar period from cosmopolitan centers along the southeastern coasts of the United States and nearby Caribbean islands. Using a transnational lens to expand the regional and gendered boundaries that have traditionally shaped the canon of modernist poetry, I focus on six women poets writing from cosmopolitan centers in the South Atlantic, namely Washington, D.C., Charleston, South Carolina, Key West, Florida, and Kingston, Jamaica. The coastal geographies of these maritime citiesoften considered part of the circumCaribbean, areas of the United States and the Caribbean that share important geographical and cultural similaritiesfostered a dynamic intersection of local, regional, and global ideologies. The project draws on extensive archival research of these poets previously unexamined poems, letters, and diaries, illuminating how their literary careers developed out of domestic and international cultural movements in the circumCaribbean. This dissertation not only responds to the double marginalization of women poets writing from the southern region, but also allows for a more complex understanding of the way cosmopolitanism in the South Atlantic shaped literary constructs of locality, regionalism, and nationhood in American modernism.