Empowering the Idiom: A Survey of Twentieth Century Women’s Poetry

Abstract

Marginalized as another to Man, women fights at every step to achieve equal status and position. Like other socio-cultural institutions and practices, literature too became centre of this battlefront. In this clash of ideas, man the patriarch, constructed a literary tradition that preserved and appropriated masculinity as the norm in literary endeavour.   And it has been the prime motive & critical concern of women writers &Theoritians to challenge & change this established androcentric tradition. Since, its inception female writers have had adopted subversive ways to alter this for an exclusively female one. Critical queries conducted in this connection, by Blau Duplessis, Judith kegan, etc appreciate various thematic & stylistic strategies adopted across cultures by women. This paper attempts to fathom out the strategic shifts and innovative techniques that characterize the female aesthetic in the Twentieth century. In addition the peculiar use of idiom by modern writers is analysed as a device & shift in semiotics to attain desired subversive effects.