Early modern women's writing and the rhetoric of modesty / Patricia Pender.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pender, Patricia.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

English literature.

English literature--Women authors.

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

Modesty in literature.

Physical Description:

x, 218 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Summary:

Why are the most famous examples of early modern women's writing professions of inadequacy, apology, and self-denigration? Why have we so frequently read these pronouncements as straightforward autobiographical assertions? Early Modern Women's Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty revisits the classic, even clichéd trope of the woman writer's humility, rereading this familiar pose of abjection through the lenses of early modem rhetorical practice, protocols of early modern printed publication, and debates in contemporary feminist theory. In the process, the book provides provocative new readings of five now-prominent women writers-Anne Askew, Katherine Parr, Mary Sidney Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, and Anne Bradstreet - revealing the surprisingly assertive and ambitious subtexts of their conventional expressions of modesty. These readings challenge long-held assumptions about early modem women's authorial self-fashioning and examine the ways in which the figure of the woman writer and the category of gender continue to hold crucial, determining, and fetishized positions in our prevailing models of literary history. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 From Self-Effacement to Sprezzatura: Modesty and Manipulation 16

2 Sola Scriptura: Reading, Speech, and Silence in The Examinations of Anne Askew 36

I Askew reading 39

II Reading Bale reading 44

III Reading Bale reading Askew 48

IV Between 'sygne' and 'substance': the figurality of modesty 52

3 'A worme most abjecte': Sermo Humilis as Reformation Strategy in Katherine Parr's Prayers or Medytacions 64

I Prayers or Medytacions: textual composition and critical reception 67

II Parr's modesty rhetoric: generic and gendered, public and private 72

III Submission and survival: rhetoric as praxis 85

4 Mea Mediocritas: Mary Sidney, Modesty, and the History of the Book 92

I Mea Mediocritas: 'my Muse offends' 95

II 'But soft my muse': the exigencies of inexpressibility 100

III Exercises in subjection: modesty rhetoric as counter discourse 104

IV The ghost and the machine: Philip and Mary Sidney 108

V 'I weav'd this webb to end': women writers in the history of the book 114

5 'This triall of my slender skill': Inexpressibility and Interpretative Community in Aemilia Lanyer's Encomia 122

I The challenge of the chiastic contract 125

II 'The first fruits of a womans wit': novelty and license 130

III Trouble in paradise: Aemilia Lanyer's interpretative communities 137

6 'To be a foole in print': Anne Bradstreet and the Romance of 'Pirated' Publication 149

I 'To super-adde in praises': John Woodbridge's paratexts 152

II 'Simple I, according to my skill': the rhetoric of renunciation 158

III 'Men can do best and women know it well': disavowal and its discontents 161

IV 'No rhetoricke we expect': rewriting women's literary history 164.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 194-212) and index.a.

ISBN:

9780230362246

0230362249

OCLC:

764357466