Re-Reading Mary Wroth

Re-Reading Mary Wroth
Author: K. Larson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2015-02-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137473347

Approaching the writings of Mary Wroth through a fresh 21st-century lens, this volume accounts for and re-invents the literary scholarship of one of the first "canonized" women writers of the English Renaissance. Essays present different practices that emerge around "reading" Wroth, including editing, curating, and digital reproduction.

Gender and Representations of the Female Subject in Early Modern England

Gender and Representations of the Female Subject in Early Modern England
Author: Akiko Kusunoki
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2015-09-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137558938

This book examines the interactions between social assumptions about womanhood and women's actual voices represented in plays and writings by authors of both genders in Jacobean England, placing the special emphasis on Lady Mary Wroth.

The Ashgate Research Companion to The Sidneys, 1500–1700

The Ashgate Research Companion to The Sidneys, 1500–1700
Author: Mary Ellen Lamb
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2017-02-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 135170110X

Presented in two volumes, The Ashgate Research Companion to The Sidneys, 1500-1700 assesses the current state of scholarship on members of the Sidney family and their impact, as historical and/or literary figures, in the period 1500-1700. Volume 2: Literature, begins with an exploration of the Sidneys' books and manuscripts and how they circulated, followed by an overview of the contributions of family members -Sir Philip Sidney; Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Lady Mary Wroth; Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester; and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke - in the genres of prose romance, drama, poetry, psalms and prose. These essays outline major controversies and areas for further research, as well as conducting literary analysis.

Narrative Structure and Reader Formation in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania

Narrative Structure and Reader Formation in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania
Author: Rahel Orgis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2016-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317090497

Narrative Structure and Reader Formation in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania offers the first systematic formal and thematic analysis of Wroth’s Urania in its historical context and explores the structural means by which Wroth fashions her readership. The book thus has a dual focus, at once on narrative art and reader formation. It makes two original claims, the first being that the Urania is not the unorganized accumulation of stories critics have tended to present it as, but a work of sophisticated narrative structures i.e. a complex text in a positive sense. These structures are revealed by means of a circumspect narratological analysis of the formal and thematic patterns that organise the Urania. Such an analysis furthers our understanding of the reading strategies that Wroth encourages. The second claim is, then, that through the careful structuring of her text Wroth seeks to create her own ideal readership. More precisely, the formal and thematic structures of the Urania engage with readers’ expectations, inviting them to reflect on prominent thematic issues and respond to the text as what early modern prefaces term "good" readers. Combining narratological methods with a generic perspective and taking into account the work of book historians on early modern reading practices, this monograph provides a new approach to the Urania, supplementing the typically gender- or (auto)biographically-oriented interpretations of the romance. Moreover, it contributes to the study of early modern (prose) narrative and romance and exemplifies how historically contextualised narratological analysis may yield new insights and profit research on reading strategies.

Queer Faith

Queer Faith
Author: Melissa E. Sanchez
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2019-08-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1479871877

Honorable Mention, 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, given by the Modern Language Association Uncovers the queer logics of premodern religious and secular texts Putting premodern theology and poetry in dialogue with contemporary theory and politics, Queer Faith reassess the commonplace view that a modern veneration of sexual monogamy and fidelity finds its roots in Protestant thought. What if this narrative of “history and tradition” suppresses the queerness of its own foundational texts? Queer Faith examines key works of the prehistory of monogamy—from Paul to Luther, Petrarch to Shakespeare—to show that writing assumed to promote fidelity in fact articulates the affordances of promiscuity, both in its sexual sense and in its larger designation of all that is impure and disorderly. At the same time, Melissa E. Sanchez resists casting promiscuity as the ethical, queer alternative to monogamy, tracing instead how ideals of sexual liberation are themselves attached to nascent racial and economic hierarchies. Because discourses of fidelity and freedom are also discourses on racial and sexual positionality, excavating the complex historical entanglement of faith, race, and eroticism is urgent to contemporary queer debates about normativity, agency, and relationality. Deliberately unfaithful to disciplinary norms and national boundaries, this book assembles new conceptual frameworks at the juncture of secular and religious thought, political and aesthetic form. It thereby enlarges the contexts, objects, and authorized genealogies of queer scholarship. Retracing a history that did not have to be, Sanchez recovers writing that inscribes radical queer insights at the premodern foundations of conservative and heteronormative culture.

The Ashgate Research Companion to The Sidneys, 1500–1700

The Ashgate Research Companion to The Sidneys, 1500–1700
Author: Professor Margaret P Hannay
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2015-07-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1409450384

Few families have contributed as much to English history and literature as the Sidney family. This two-volume Ashgate Research Companion assesses the current state of scholarship on family members and their impact in the period 1500-1700. Volume 1, Lives, includes an overview of the Sidneys and politics, providing some links to court events, entertainments, literature, and patronage; biographies of a number of high-profile Sidney women and men; and sections assessing the influence of the family in the areas of the English court, international politics, patronage, religion, public entertainment, the visual arts and music.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700
Author: Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 897
Release: 2022-09-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192604732

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 brings together new work by scholars across the globe, from some of the founding figures in early modern women's writing to those early in their careers and defining the field now. It investigates how and where women gained access to education, how they developed their literary voice through varied genres including poetry, drama, and letters, and how women cultivated domestic and technical forms of knowledge from recipes and needlework to medicines and secret codes. Chapters investigate the ways in which women's writing was an integral part of the intellectual culture of the period, engaging with male writers and traditions, while also revealing the ways in which women's lives and writings were often distinctly different, from women prophetesses to queens, widows, and servants. It explores the intersections of women writing in English with those writing in French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, in Europe and in New England, and argues for an archipelagic understanding of women's writing in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. Finally, it reflects on—and challenges—the methodologies which have developed in, and with, the field: book and manuscript history, editing, digital analysis, premodern critical race studies, network theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 captures the most innovative work on early modern women's writing in English at present.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English

The Oxford History of Poetry in English
Author: Laura L. Knoppers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2024-08-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198852800

Beginning with the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I and ending late in the seventeenth century, this volume traces the growth of the literary marketplace, the development of poetic genres, and the participation of different writers in a century of poetic continuity, change, and transformation.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English

The Oxford History of Poetry in English
Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2024-08-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198930232

The Oxford History of Poetry in English (OHOPE) is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. OHOPE both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. By taking as its purview the full seventeenth century, 1603-1700, this volume re-draws the existing literary historical map and expands upon recent rethinking of the canon. Placing the revolutionary years at the centre of a century of poetic transformation, and putting the Restoration back into the seventeenth century, the volume registers the transformative effects on poetic forms of a century of social, political, and religious upheaval. It considers the achievements of a number of women poets, not yet fully integrated into traditional literary histories. It assimilates the vibrant literature of the English Revolution to what came before and after, registering its long-term impact. It traces the development of print culture and of the literary marketplace, alongside the continued circulation of poetry in manuscript. It places John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips and other mid-century poets into the full century of specifically literary development. It traces continuity and change, imitation and innovation in the full-century trajectory of such poetic genres as sonnet, elegy, satire, georgic, epigram, ode, devotional lyric, and epic. The volume's attention to poetic form builds on the current upswing in historicist formalism, allowing a close focus on poetry as an intensely aesthetic and social literary mode. Designed for maximum classroom utility, the organization is both thematic and (in the authors section) chronological. After a comprehensive Introduction, organizational sections focus on Transitions; Materiality, Production, and Circulation; Poetics and Form; Genres; and Poets.

The Matter of Song in Early Modern England

The Matter of Song in Early Modern England
Author: Katherine R. Larson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2019-08-29
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0192581937

Given the variety and richness of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English 'songscape', it might seem unsurprising to suggest that early modern song needs to be considered as sung. When a reader encounters a song in a sonnet sequence, a romance, and even a masque or a play, however, the tendency is to engage with it as poem rather than as musical performance. Opening up the notion of song from a performance-based perspective The Matter of Song in Early Modern England considers the implications of reading song not simply as lyric text but as an embodied and gendered musical practice. Animating the traces of song preserved in physiological and philosophical commentaries, singing handbooks, poetic treatises, and literary texts ranging from Mary Sidney Herbert's Psalmes to John Milton's Comus, the book confronts song's ephemerality, its lexical and sonic capriciousness, and its airy substance. These features can resist critical analysis but were vital to song's affective workings in the early modern period. The volume foregrounds the need to attend much more closely to the embodied and musical dimensions of literary production and circulation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It also makes an important and timely contribution to our understanding of women's engagement with song as writers and as performers. A companion recording of fourteen songs featuring Larson (soprano) and Lucas Harris (lute) brings the project's innovative methodology and central case studies to life.