Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing GenreJHU Press, 2005 M12 31 - 747 pages “Our sense of eighteenth-century poetic territory is immeasurably expanded by [this] excellent historical and cultural” study of UK women poets of the era (Cynthia Wall, Studies in English Literature). This major work offers a broad view of the writing and careers of eighteenth-century women poets, casting new light on the ways in which poetry was read and enjoyed, on changing poetic tastes in British culture, and on the development of many major poetic genres and traditions. Rather than presenting a chronological survey, Paula R. Backscheider explores the forms in which women wrote and the uses to which they put those forms. Considering more than forty women in relation to canonical male writers of the same era, she concludes that women wrote in all of the genres that men did but often adapted, revised, and even created new poetic kinds from traditional forms. Backscheider demonstrates that knowledge of these women’s poetry is necessary for an accurate and nuanced literary history. Within chapters on important verse forms, she sheds light on such topics as women’s use of religious poetry to express ideas about patriarchy and rape; the important role of friendship poetry; same-sex desire in elegy by women as well as by men; and the status of Charlotte Smith as a key figure of the long eighteenth century, not only as a Romantic-era poet. Co-Winner, James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association |
Contents
Anne Finch and What Women Wrote | |
Women and Poetry in the Public | |
Hymns Narratives and Innovations in Religious Poetry | |
Friendship Poems | |
Retirement Poetry | |
The Elegy | |
The Sonnet Charlotte Smith and What Women Wrote | |
Conclusion | |
Biographies of the Poets | |
Index | |
Other editions - View all
Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing ... Paula R. Backscheider No preview available - 2007 |
Common terms and phrases
Anna Laetitia Barbauld Anna Seward Anne Finch Barbauld beautiful begins Behn canon Carter century Charlotte Smith Chudleigh contemporaries contrast conventional created critics cultural Darwall death describes Egerton eighteenth eighteenth-century elegies Elizabeth Carter Elizabeth Singer Rowe Elizabeth Tollet English Epistle especially ev'ry example express fables feeling female friendship poems gender genres georgic happy heart heroic couplets Honora Horatian husband hymns imaginative instance Jane Brereton Lady lines literary history Lonsdale marriage Mary Mary Darwall Mary Leapor Mary Masters melancholy mind Montagu Muse narrative paraphrase pastoral Philips pleasure poetic kinds poets political Pope Pope's popular praise psalms published readers relationship religious poetry retirement poems Reynolds Rowe's satire says Seward sing social soliloquies song sonnet Soul Spleen sublime thee theme thou thought Tibullus tradition verse voice woman women poets women writers women's poetry writing written wrote