Honors College Theses
Publication Date
2016
Major
English (B.A.)
Document Type and Release Option
Thesis (restricted to Georgia Southern)
Faculty Mentor
Dr. Joe Pellegrino
Abstract
Throughout her career, Rita Dove’s poetic project has circled around addressing commonly-conceived ways of reading history, offering a variety of perspectives on histories that may have been forgotten or overlooked. This thesis presents an analysis of poems in her Pulitzer Prize winning Thomas and Beulah as an exploration of personal histories which may not be familiar to anyone beyond a small circle of family members. I move then to an analysis of selected poems in her On the Bus with Rosa Parks as an example of her explorations of famous historical events through multiple lenses, each coming from voices that are either overlooked or forgotten. Finally, I consider several poems from Sonata Mulattica as representative of Dove’s work to uncover hidden histories, in this case the life of George Bridgetower, the mulatto violin prodigy, internationally famous in his time but forgotten now, for whom Beethoven originally wrote his famous Kreutzer Sonata.
Recommended Citation
Gray, Carmen 2890070, "Re-Presenting the Past: Valuing Perspective and the Plural Nature of Truth in the Historical Poetry of Rita Dove" (2016). Honors College Theses. 169.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/honors-theses/169
