Eighteenth-century women poets and their poetry : inventing agency, inventing genre / Paula R. Backscheider.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Backscheider, Paula R.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English poetry--18th century--History and criticism.

English poetry.

Women and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Women and literature.

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

Authorship--Sex differences--History--18th century.

Authorship.

Invention (Rhetoric)--History--18th century.

Invention (Rhetoric).

Literary form--History--18th century.

Literary form.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (545 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Baltimore, MD ; London : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Plan of the Book

Approaching the Poetry

The Chapters

1 Introduction

Changing Contexts

Systems, Gender, and Persistent Issues

Agency and the "Marked Marker"

2 Anne Finch and What Women Wrote

The Social and the Formal

Anne Finch and Popular Poetry

Poetry on Poetry

The Spleen as Legacy

3 Women and Poetry in the Public Eye

Poetry as News and Critique

The Woman Question

Elizabeth Singer Rowe

4 Hymns, Narratives, and Innovations in Religious Poetry

The Voice of Paraphrase

The Hymn as Personal Lyric

Religious Poetry as Subversive Narrative

Devout Soliloquies

5 Friendship Poems

The Legacy of Katherine Philips

Encouragement and the Counteruniverse

Jane Brereton

Adaptation and Ideology

6 Retirement Poetry

Beyond Convention

Memory, Time, and Elizabeth Carter

Reflection and Difference

7 The Elegy

What Did Women Write?

Representative Composers: Darwall and Seward

The Elegy and Same-Sex Desire

Entertainment and Forgetting

8 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

9 Conclusion

Biographies of the Poets

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780801881695

0801881692

9780801895906

0801895901

OCLC:

547500660

Publisher Number:

2027/heb09117 hdl