Eighteenth-century women poets and their poetry : inventing agency, inventing genre
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
Criticism, interpretation, etc
1 online resource (xxvii, 514 pages)
9780801895906, 0801895901
547500660
Introduction
Changing contexts
Systems, gender, and persistent issues
Agency and the "marked marker"
Anne Finch and what women wrote
The social and the formal
Anne Finch and popular poetry
Poetry on poetry
The spleen as legacy
Women and poetry in the public eye
Poetry as news and critique
The woman question
Elizabeth Singer Rowe
Hymns, narratives, and innovations in religious poetry
The voice of paraphrase
The hymn as personal lyric
Religious poetry as subversive narrative
Devout soliloquies
Friendship poems
The legacy of Katherine Philips
Encouragement and the counteruniverse
Jane Brereton
Adaptation and ideology
Retirement poetry
Beyond convention
Memory, time, and Elizabeth Carter
Reflection and difference
The elegy
What did women write?
Representative composers: Darwall and Seward
The elegy and same-sex desire
Entertainment and forgetting
The sonnet, Charlotte Smith, and what women wrote
The sonnet and the political
Sonnet sequences
Women poets and the spread of the sonnet
The emigrants, conversations, and Beachy Head
Smith as transitional poet
Electronic reproduction, [Place of publication not identified], HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010
English
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