Write or be Written Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints

Although the field of early modern women's studies has blossomed in recent years, little attention has been paid to women poets of the period. This new collection is specifically designed to fill the gap, applying new critical methodologies and theories to this group of early modern writers. Write or Be Written also contributes to ongoing debates about canonicity, periodicity, disciplinarity, and the construction of knowledge. The essays in this volume reflect today's sophisticated critical thinking, and represent a broad range of approaches and methodologies. Topics covered include contextualizing the self; female discursive strategies; religious discourses and gender; writing a female space; negotiating power and desire; female writing and the marketplace/publishing; and revisions of male-dominated poetic conventions and traditions.

Contents: Introduction; I: Strategies and Contexts: Widow, prophet, and poet: lyrical self-figurations in Katherine Austen’s Book M (1664), Pamela Hammons; Public and Private in Aphra Behn’s Miscellanies: women writers, print, and manuscript, Anne Russell; Household Affaires are the Opium of the Soul : Damaris Masham and the necessity of women’s poetry, Margaret J.M. Ezell; II: Poetic Conventions and Traditions: Mary Wroth’s guilty secrett art : the poetics of jealousy in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Clare R. Kinney; An emblem of themselves, in plum or pear : Poetry the female body and the country house, Jacqueline Pearson; So may I with the Psalmist truly say : early modern Englishwomen’s Psalm discourse, Margaret P. Hannay; III: Negotiating Power and Politics: The plural voices of Anne Askew, Joan Pong Linton; Mary Sidney and gendered strategies for the writing of poetry, Shannon Miller; Subd’d by You : states of friendship and friends of the State in Katherine Philips’s poetry, Andrew Shifflett; IV: Writing the Female Poet: First Fruits of a Woman’s Wit : authorial self-construction of English Renaissance women poets, Helen Wilcox; A rhetoric of innocence: the poetry of Katherine Philips, The Matchless Orinda , Bronwen Price; Very Like a Fiction : some early biographies of Aphra Behn, Jeslyn Medoff; Index.