Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing GenreJohns Hopkins University Press, 2005 M12 31 - 544 pages Co-Winner, James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association This major study 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 canonical and popular verse forms, she gives particular attention to such topics as women's use of religious poetry to express candid ideas about patriarchy and rape; the continuing evolution and important role of the supposedly antiquarian genre of the 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. |
From inside the book
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... final lines that bring together public and private display a mastery found in few other poets of the century . “ Yett e're to their cost they know thee " - love is indeed a danger to women , as the poems , novels , and even conduct ...
... final section of her book is modestly titled , Rhymes to the Hon . Miss [ Martha ] Lovelace ; now Lady Henry Beauclerk . The final poem in it explains , “ The songs I sung you kindly took / And bid me put ' em in a book . " 111 The ...
... final heroic couplet . The final poems bring all of her themes and didactic purposes together . She admits that they are too long for most children , " but to those who have any knowledge of Geography or Mythology , or who have a taste ...
Contents
Anne Finch and What Women Wrote | 28 |
Women and Poetry in the Public Eye | 80 |
Hymns Narratives and Innovations in Religious Poetry | 123 |
Copyright | |
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Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing ... Paula R. Backscheider No preview available - 2007 |