Forms of Engagement
Women, Poetry and Culture 1640-1680
Published on 13. June 2013
Book
Hardback
248 pages
978-0-19-967652-1 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
so many of the close readings of passages throughout the book are splendidly illuminating. * Neil Forsyth, Times Literary Supplement * this excellent book raises many of the issues at stake. It should be thoughtfully read by anyone interested in seventeenth-century literature. * Neil Forsyth, Universite de Lausanne, The Journal of the English Association * Scott-Baumann's meticulous attention to a refreshingly wide range of formal properties and her acute readings of Philips, Hutchinson and Cavendish in relation to their literary influences offer original insights into the work of all three poets ... an impressive contribution to our understanding of the complexity and importance of all three poets. * Hero Chalmers, The Seventeenth Century * brilliant close readings ... a larger, sophisticated argument for the relation of reading to form ... an impressively rich account of early modern women writers' important poetic and intellectual contributions to their culture. * Catharine Gray, Modern Philology * Forms of Engagement makes a valuable contribution to histories of reading, intertextuality and intellectual milieus in seventeenth-century England. The book is to be commended for its imbrication of questions of form with questions of historicity and materiality, and also for its ability to breathe new life into such supposedly staid topics as prosody and metrical regularity. For the women writers who are, ultimately, the central object of this study, Scott-Baumann has produced an erudite testament to their formal sophistication, to the self-consciousness with which they engaged and occasionally challenged literary conventions and to the seriousness of their distinctive literary practices. * Patricia Pender, Review of English Studies *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Students and scholars of early modern poetry; students and scholars of women's literature.
Dimensions
Height: 222 mm
Width: 145 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
448 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-967652-1 (9780199676521)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
06/2013
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€74.99
Available for download
Person
Elizabeth Scott-Baumann completed her doctorate at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University. She has taught at Oxford University and Oxford Brookes University and is now Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Kings College London. She co-edited The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558-1680 (Palgrave, 2010).
Content
Introduction: Reading, gender and form ; 1. Margaret Cavendish, Nature, and Originality ; 2. Margaret Cavendish as Editor and Reviser ; 3. Katherine Philips and Abraham Cowley: Solitude, Dialogue, and the Ode ; 4. Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson Reading John Donne ; 5. Lucy Hutchinson's Elegies, the Country-House Poem and Female Complaint ; 6. Lucy Hutchinson, the Bible, and Order and Disorder ; Afterword: Untracked paths