Veronica Forrest-Thomson

This study offers a comprehensive examination of the work of the young poet and scholar, Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-1975) in the context of a literary-critical revolution of the late sixties and seventies and evaluates her work against contemporary debates in poetry and poetics. Gareth Farmer explores Forrest-Thomson’s relationship to the conflicting models of literary criticism in the twentieth century such as the close-reading models of F.R Leavis and William Empson, postructuralist models, and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Written by the leading scholar on Forrest-Thomson’s work, this study explores Forrest-Thomson’s published work as well as unpublished materials from the Veronica Forrest-Thomson Archive. Drawing on close readings of Forrest-Thomson’s writings, this study argues that her work enables us reevaluate literary-critical history and suggests new paradigms for the literary aesthetics and poetics of the future.

• French structuralism
• twentieth-century British literary studies
• F. R. Leavis
• William Empson
• poststructuralism
• models of language
• debates on twentieth-century poetic form
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Donald Davie
• Veronica Forrest-Thomson and literary debate
• theoretics of poetry
• Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry
• women in literary tradition
• twentieth-century female poet
• female modernist poet
• Dada
• Influence of nineteenth-century poetry on modernists
• Stéphane Mallarmé’s
• poetic convention
• British and Irish Literature

• University of Bedfordshire, Luton, United Kingdom

  Gareth Farmer

Gareth Farmer is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bedfordshire, UK and a poet. He has written essays on a range of modern and contemporary experimental writers and on literary and critical theory. He is the Senior Academic Consultant to the Veronica Forrest-Thomson Archive at Girton College Library, Cambridge.

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