Re-Reading Mary Wroth

by Larson, Katherine R.; Miller, Naomi J.

• ISBN13: 9781137479624
• ISBN10: 1137479620
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-02-04
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

2016 will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Reading Mary Wroth, a groundbreaking collection that helped to propel interest in Wroth before modern editions of most of her texts were available. A surge of critical interest in Wroth is now transforming our experiences of reading her. This volume charts opportunities for scholars and students to re-read Mary Wroth now that the necessity of reading her has been recognized. It also establishes new directions for the broadening field of early modern women's writing. In extending the work of the 1991 volume, Re-Reading Mary Wroth takes seriously the many different practices that emerge around the term "reading," including editing, performance, curating, pedagogy, scholarly and creative writing, and digital reproduction. The essays featured in this collection thus extend the boundaries of the "canon" of approaches to literature in much the same way that Wroth's "rediscovery" has helped to expand and destabilize the very notion of canonicity. In Re-Reading Mary Wroth, Wroth becomes a fruitful point of departure as much as a subject of analysis in her own right.

Author Biography

Katherine R. Larson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Early Modern Women in Conversation (2011) and co-editor of Gender and Song in Early Modern England (2014). Her articles have appeared in journals including English Literary Renaissance, Milton Studies, the Sidney Journal, and Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, as well as in a number of essay collections.

Naomi J. Miller is Professor of English and the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College, USA. A pioneering Wroth scholar, she is the co-editor of Reading Mary Wroth (1991) and author of Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England (1996). She has recently completed a novel, The Tale-Teller, which offers a fictional historical account of Wroth's life.

Andrew Strycharski is Assistant Professor of English at Florida International University, USA, where he teaches courses in Renaissance literature and culture, rhetoric, and media studies and directs the film and media studies program. He currently serves as President of the International Sidney Society. He has published on the Sidney circle and early modern literature and culture in such journals as Criticism, SEL, and the Sidney Journal.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Re-Reading Mary Wroth: Networks of Knowing; Katherine R. Larson, Naomi J. Miller, and Andrew Strycharski
PART I: RE-EXAMINING WROTH: AUTHORSHIP, LIFE, AND SOCIETY
1. Sleuthing in the Archives: The Life of Lady Mary Wroth; Margaret P. Hannay
2. Authorship and Author-Characters in Sidney and Wroth; Barbara K. Lewalski
3. "Can you suspect a change in me?": Poems by Mary Wroth and William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke; Mary Ellen Lamb
4. Performing "fitter means": Marriage and Authorship in Love's Victory; Beverly M. Van Note
PART II: RE-MEASURING WROTH: FORM AND RITUAL
5. Turn and Counter-Turn: Reappraising Mary Wroth's Poetic Labyrinths; Clare R. Kinney
6. Measuring Authorship: Framing Forms, Genres, and Authors in Urania; Kristiane Stapleton
7. Voicing Lyric: The Songs of Mary Wroth; Katherine R. Larson
8. "Change Partners and Dance": Pastoral Virtuosity in Wroth's Love's Victory; Karen L. Nelson
9. Gifts of Fruit and Marriage Feasts in Mary Wroth's Urania; Madeline Bassnett
PART III: RE-MEDIATING WROTH: EDITING AND THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES
10. The Autograph Manuscript of Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus; Ilona Bell
11. Me and My Shadow: Editing Wroth for the Digital Age; Paul Salzman
12. Pamphilia Unbound: Digital Re-visions of Mary Wroth's Folger Manuscript, V.a.104; Rebecca L. Fall
13. Crowdsourcing the Urania: Lady Mary Wroth and Twenty-First-Century Technology; Sheila T. Cavanagh
PART IV: RE-MIXING WROTH: BEYOND THE ACADEMY
14. Curating Mary Wroth; Georgianna Ziegler
15. Strange Labyrinths: Wroth, Higher Education, and the Humanities; Nona Fienberg
16. 'To beeleeve this but a fiction and dunn to please and pass the time': Re-Imagining Mary Wroth and William Herbert in Feigning Poetry; Gary Waller
17. Re-Imagining the Subject: Traveling from Scholarship to Fiction with Mary Wroth; Naomi J. Miller