Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560-1621 The Politics of Absence

by Smith, Rosalind

• ISBN13: 9781403991225
• ISBN10: 1403991227
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-11-29
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This study explores why women in the English Renaissance wrote so few sonnet sequences in comparison with Continental women writers and English male authors. Rosalind Smith examines the relationship between gender and genre in the early modern period, and the critical assumptions currently underpinning questions of feminine agency within genre.

Author Biography

Rosalind Smith is Lecturer in English, University of Newcastle, Australia.

Table of Contents

Preface	viii
List of Abbreviations	xii
Introduction: Gender, Genre and Attribution in Early Modern Women's Sonnet Sequences and Collections	1	(12)
1 'In a mirrour clere': Anne Lock's Miserere mei Deus as Admonitory Protestantism	13	(26)
Attribution and agency in early modern women's writing: The case of the Meditation	15	(11)
The politics of dedication and circulation	26	(5)
Out-troping Wyatt	31	(8)
2 Generating Absence: The Sonnets of Mary Stuart	39	(22)
The casket sonnets: Attribution, circulation and sovereign textuality	40	(6)
The politics of absence: The casket sonnets and the feminine erotic lyric	46	(9)
The devotional sonnets	55	(6)
3 The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets	61	(27)
The Pandora sonnets: Translations from Desportes	65	(7)
Ventriloquizing Elizabeth I	72	(7)
The politics of prosopopoeia	79	(9)
4 The Politics of Withdrawal: Lady Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and Lindamira's Complaint	88	(31)
'Bard...of Light': Spenserian negotiations in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus	92	(17)
'I thus goe arm'd to field': Lindamira's Complaint	109	(10)
Conclusion	119	(4)
Notes	123	(22)
Bibliography	145	(20)
Index	165