Renaissance Literature And Its Formal Engagements

What might a self-conscious turn to formal analysis look like in Renaissance literary studies today, after theory and the new historicism? The essays collected here address this question from a variety of critical perspectives, as part of a renewed willingness within literary and cultural studies to engage questions of form. Essays by Paul Alpers, Douglas Bruster, Stephen Cohen, Heather Dubrow, William Flesch, Joseph Loewenstein, Elizabeth Harris Sagaser, and Mark Womack, together with an introduction of Mark David Rasmussen and an afterword by Richard Strier.

What does it mean for a woman to write an elegy, ode, epic, or blazon in the seventeenth century? How does their reading affect women's use of particular poetic forms and what can the physical appearance of a poem, in print and manuscript, reveal about how that poem in turn was read? Forms of Engagement shows how the aesthetic qualities of early modern women's poetry emerge from the culture in which they write. It reveals previously unrecognized patterns of influence between women poets Katherine Philips, Lucy Hutchinson, and Margaret Cavendish and their peers and predecessors: how Lucy Hutchinson responded to Ben Jonson and John Milton, how Margaret Cavendish responded to Thomas Hobbes and the scientists of the early Royal Society, and how Katherine Philips re-worked Donne's lyrics and may herself have influenced Abraham Cowley and Andrew Marvell. This book places analysis of form at the centre of an historical study of women writers, arguing that reading for form is reading for influence. Hutchinson, Philips, and Cavendish were immersed in mid-seventeenth century cultural developments, from the birth of experimental philosophy, to the local and state politics of civil war and the rapid expansion of women's print publication. For women poets, reworking poetic forms such as elegy, ode, epic, and couplet was a fundamental engagement with the culture in which they wrote. By focusing on these interactions, rather than statements of exclusion and rejection, a formalist reading of these women can actually provide a more nuanced historical view of their participation in literary culture.

Dowd investigates literature's engagement with the gendered conflicts of early modern England by examining the narratives that seventeenth-century dramatists created to describe the lives of working women.

This collection affirms the shaping authority of early modern women in literature and culture, evident well beyond their own moment.

The essays in this collection reach beyond book history to address fundamental questions about historicism with a broad range of issues such as gender and sexuality, religion, political theory, economic history, adaptation and appropriation, and quantitative analysis and digital humanities.

Beyond the Cloister reveals the literary significance of manuscripts and printed books written by and about post-Reformation Catholic Englishwomen, offering a reassessment of crucial decades in the development of English literary history.

Revised throughout, the book includes: a new introduction which focuses attention on what is specific to literature's treatment of the human (as epitomised by Shakespeare); a section drawing on new work on literary genres as different forms of engagement