Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women's Writing

Readings, Conversations, Pedagogies

Lara Dodds, Michelle M. Dowd

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781496220424
• eBook ISBN: 9781496231536
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women's Writing reexamines the relationship between gender and form in early modern women's writing in essays that elaborate the specific literary strategies of women writers, that examine women's debts to and appropriations of different literary genres, and that offer practical suggestions for the teaching of women's texts in several different contexts. Contributors explore the possibility of feminist formalism, a methodology that both attends to the structural, rhetorical, and other formal techniques of a given text and takes gender as a central category of analysis. This collection contends that feminist formalism is a useful tool for scholars of the early modern period and for literary studies more broadly because it marries the traditional questions of formalism—including questions of style, genre, and literary history—with the political and cultural concerns of feminist inquiry. Contributors reposition works by important women writers—such as Margaret Cavendish, Hester Pulter, Mary Wroth, and Katherine Philips—as central to the development of English literary tradition. By examining a variety of texts written by women, including recipes, emblems, exchanges, and poetry, Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women's Writing contributes to existing scholarship on early modern women's writing while extending it in new and important directions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part 1
• 1. Taking the Thread of Mary Wroth’s “A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love”
• 2. Margaret Cavendish’s Forms
• 3. Margaret Cavendish and the Recipe Form in Poems and Fancies
• 4. Building/s with Form
• 5. Gendering the Emblem
• Part 2
• 6. Surface Desires
• 7. Mary Wroth’s Urania Manuscript
• 8. Katherine Philips’s Monument
• 9. Formalism Dispossessed
• Part 3
• 10. Collaborative Close Readings
• 11. Teaching Early Modern Women’s Writing through Literary and Material Form
• 12. Teaching the Modesty Trope
• 13. The Idea of a Woman
• 14. Quixotic Pedagogy and Attention in the Early Modern Literature Classroom
• Contributors
• Index
• About Lara Dodds
• About Michelle M. Dowd
• Series List