SOURCE: Wallace, Jo-Ann. “Laura Riding and the Politics of Decanonization.” American Literature 64, no. 1 (March 1992): 111-26.

In the following essay, Wallace examines the reasons for the critical neglect of Riding's poetry, contending that it stemmed from her insistence on being the ultimate interpretive authority over her own work.

As my title suggests, this paper has a double intention. On the one hand, it seeks to account for the critical neglect of a major woman poet, critic, and fiction writer of the 1920s and 1930s—a neglect which is all the more bewildering in that Laura Riding's career rubbed against the three most important literary critical movements of the last sixty years: New Criticism, feminism, and deconstruction. I will argue that Riding represents the case of a writer who has been effectively decanonized because of her insistence upon being the ultimate referent of her own work and because of...