Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

Ben Burton

The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture explores the resurgent interest in literary form and aesthetics in early modern english studies. Essays by leading international scholars reflect on the legacy of historicist approaches and on calls for a renewal of formalist analysis as both a tool and as a defence of our object of study as literary critics. This collection addresses the possibilities as well as the challenges of combining these critical traditions; it tests and reflects on these through practice. It also establishes new lines of enquiry by expanding definitions of form to include the material as well as theoretical implications of the term and explores the early modern roots of these connections. The period's most famous poets such as Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Jonson appear alongside Anne Southwell, Thomas Campion, and many anonymous poets and songwriters. The Work of Form brings together contributors from literary history, historicism, manuscript study, prosodic theory, the history of music, history of the book, as well as print and manuscript culture. It represents avowedly political historical work, alongside aesthetic and theoretical frameworks, work bridging literature and music, and cognitive poetics. In bringing together these diverse commitments, it addresses urgent questions about how we can understand and analyse literary form in a historically-rooted way, and demands rigorous discussion about the status of formal and aesthetic considerations in editing, in literary criticism, and in teaching.

Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture

The Work of Form

Danielle Clarke

Sarah C. E. Ross

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 brings together new work by scholars across the globe, from some of the founding figures in early modern women's writing to those early in their careers and defining the field now. It investigates how and where women gained access to education, how they developed their literary voice through varied genres including poetry, drama, and letters, and how women cultivated domestic and technical forms of knowledge from recipes and needlework to medicines and secret codes. Chapters investigate the ways in which women's writing was an integral part of the intellectual culture of the period, engaging with male writers and traditions, while also revealing the ways in which women's lives and writings were often distinctly different, from women prophetesses to queens, widows, and servants. It explores the intersections of women writing in English with those writing in French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, in Europe and in New England, and argues for an archipelagic understanding of women's writing in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. Finally, it reflects on--and challenges--the methodologies which have developed in, and with, the field: book and manuscript history, editing, digital analysis, premodern critical race studies, network theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 captures the most innovative work on early modern women's writing in English at present.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700

What does it mean for a woman to write an elegy, ode, epic, or blazon in the seventeenth century? How does their reading affect women's use of particular poetic forms and what can the physical appearance of a poem, in print and manuscript, reveal about how that poem in turn was read? Forms of Engagement shows how the aesthetic qualities of early modern women's poetry emerge from the culture in which they write. It reveals previously unrecognized patterns of influence between women poets Katherine Philips, Lucy Hutchinson, and Margaret Cavendish and their peers and predecessors: how Lucy Hutchinson responded to Ben Jonson and John Milton, how Margaret Cavendish responded to Thomas Hobbes and the scientists of the early Royal Society, and how Katherine Philips re-worked Donne's lyrics and may herself have influenced Abraham Cowley and Andrew Marvell. This book places analysis of form at the centre of an historical study of women writers, arguing that reading for form is reading for influence. Hutchinson, Philips, and Cavendish were immersed in mid-seventeenth century cultural developments, from the birth of experimental philosophy, to the local and state politics of civil war and the rapid expansion of women's print publication. For women poets, reworking poetic forms such as elegy, ode, epic, and couplet was a fundamental engagement with the culture in which they wrote. By focusing on these interactions, rather than statements of exclusion and rejection, a formalist reading of these women can actually provide a more nuanced historical view of their participation in literary culture.

Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

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