Producing Women's Poetry, 1600-1730: Text and Paratext, Manuscript and Print

Description

Producing Women's Poetry is the first specialist study to consider English-language poetry by women across the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Gillian Wright explores not only the forms and topics favoured by women, but also how their verse was enabled and shaped by their textual and biographical circumstances. She combines traditional literary and bibliographical approaches to address women's complex use of manuscript and print and their relationships with the male-generated genres of the traditional literary canon, as well as the role of agents such as scribes, publishers and editors in helping to determine how women's poetry was preserved, circulated and remembered. Wright focuses on key figures in the emerging canon of early modern women's writing, Anne Bradstreet, Katherine Philips and Anne Finch, alongside the work of lesser-known poets Anne Southwell and Mary Monck, to create a new and compelling account of early modern women's literary history.

Gillian Wright is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham. She has published extensively on early modern women's writing and reading, and is especially interested in women's reception of classical literature and the print-manuscript nexus in female writing. She has worked with the Perdita project on manuscript compilations by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women, and her co-edited anthology Early Modern Women's Manuscript Poetry (2005) won the Josephine Roberts prize for the best edition of 2005, awarded by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Together with Hugh Adlington and Tom Lockwood, she is co-editor of the forthcoming Chaplains in Early Modern England: Patronage, Literature and Religion. She has also published on Samuel Daniel's The Civil Wars, editorial theory and the cultural influence of Stoic thinking in the early modern period.

'[A] subtle and important book ... Wright probes difficult issues of authorship and intention, male and female control of texts, bringing to these questions sensitivity to literary form and scrupulous attention to material conditions.' Notes and Queries 'Wright's detailed book will prove useful not only to those interested in the individual authors examined here, but to readers more broadly concerned with the authorship, editing, and publication of women's poetry.' Claire Canavan, SHARP News '... an absorbing, systematic exploration of the journey of early modern women's poetry 'from manuscript to print and back again', clarifying both the conditions and processes rendering it now historically visible.' Carole Sargent, Eighteenth-Century Studies 'Written with grace and care and supported by extensive archival research, Wright's work will b a valuable resource for scholars of print culture, scribal publication and women's writing for years to come.' Brian Pietras, Renaissance Quarterly 'In this superb study, Gillian Wright examines within the material environments of manuscript and print the work of five seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century women writers ... The literary history Wright sets forth in this study is brilliantly executed at every textual and contextual level.' Arthur F. Marotti, Early Modern Women Journal