Lewalski 1993 - Revision history

Wtrettien at 03:50, 9 December 2011

2011-12-09T03:50:35Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 03:50, 9 December 2011
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	balkanization of women's writing		balkanization of women's writing

	:"yet these texts urgently need to be read with the full scholarly apparatus of textual analysis, historical synthesis, and literary interpretation in play, ~~wince~~ they come before us bare and unaccommodated, without the accretion of scholarship and critical opinion through the ages that so largely determines how we understand and value literary works." (1-2)		:"yet these texts urgently need to be read with the full scholarly apparatus of textual analysis, historical synthesis, and literary interpretation in play, since they come before us bare and unaccommodated, without the accretion of scholarship and critical opinion through the ages that so largely determines how we understand and value literary works." (1-2)

	Jacobean court seen as hostile to women; yet we first hear Englishwomen's voices in large numbers during this period -- "breakthrough to female authorship" (3)		Jacobean court seen as hostile to women; yet we first hear Englishwomen's voices in large numbers during this period -- "breakthrough to female authorship" (3)

Wtrettien: /* Revising Genres and Claiming the Woman's Part: Mary Wroth's Oeuvre */

2011-11-13T18:20:35Z

Revising Genres and Claiming the Woman's Part: Mary Wroth's Oeuvre

← Older revision		Revision as of 18:20, 13 November 2011
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	Jonson's sonnet to Wroth (247)		Jonson's sonnet to Wroth (247)

			''Pamphilia to Amphilanthus''
			* "revisions represent the awakening to love as grounded in the desires of the woman, not the physical charms of the (male) beloved" (253)
			* Night and its qualities as "valued female companions," Night as her alter ego (254)
			* "In locating the drama of love and desire in the consciousness of the woman lover-poet, Wroth reverses (and exaggerates) the customary Petrarchan focus on the male speaker's psych. The Petrarchists, however, define the male lover-poet's subjectivity by constructing the female beloved as object, while Wroth deliberately eschews this move. Amphilanthus is virtually elided from the sequence , and Pamphilia defines herself and her determined, constant love by direct and persistent introspection and self-analysis." (256)
			* "Wroth makes the love experience itself -- not the beloved -- the locus of value and the stimulus to poetry" (256)

			''Urania'' Part I
			* "an idealizing fantasy of female desire only partially overlies a dark image of the Jacobean world" (265)
			* two motifs: the tyranny of love and male inconstancy (267)
			* "The romance focus on love permits exploration of the conflict between private desire and public duty (the Queen's two bodies)" (271)
			* many interpolated tales and poems "explor[e] the issue of poetics, reading, and women's writing" representing "romances as proper vehicles for women's self-discovery, thereby valorizing the kind of reading long denounced as characteristic of, but very dangerous to, women" (277)
			* "A major means of self-definition and agency for Wroth's heroines is literary composition -- the telling of tales about themselves and others, and the making of poems." (277)
			* 56 poems in published ''Urania''; one engraved on an ash tree and three inscriptions (278)

			''Urania'', Part II
			* even more than Part I, "evokes Jacobean court society" through masques, banquets, dancles, triumphs, hunting, etc (283)

			''Love's Victory''
			* pastoral tragicomedy; 5-act structure, contain lyrical songs and choruses, have stock characters; generic precedents 296-8
			* "Here, troubles arise chiefly from love's natural anxieties -- jealousy, misapprehensions, suspicions, and fears -- rather than treacherous plots and violence" (299)
			* "Wroth's drama portrays (beyond anything else in this genre) an egalitarian community without gender or class hierarchy, bound together by friendships within and across gender that are strong enough to survive even rivalries in love." (299-300)
			* structured around ecloguelike game or contest engaging several members of the community (303)

Wtrettien: /* Imagining Female Community: Aemilia Lanyer's Poems */

2011-11-12T19:41:43Z

Imagining Female Community: Aemilia Lanyer's Poems

← Older revision		Revision as of 19:41, 12 November 2011
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	* "is a defense and celebration of the enduring community of good women that reaches from Eve to contemporary Jacobean patronesses. Lanyer imagines that community as distinctively separate from male society and its evils, and proclaims herself its poet." (213)		* "is a defense and celebration of the enduring community of good women that reaches from Eve to contemporary Jacobean patronesses. Lanyer imagines that community as distinctively separate from male society and its evils, and proclaims herself its poet." (213)
	* "her dedications rewrite the institution of patronage in female terms, transforming the relationships assumed in the male patronage system into an ideal community" (221)		* "her dedications rewrite the institution of patronage in female terms, transforming the relationships assumed in the male patronage system into an ideal community" (221)
			* generic precedents: religious complaint poem, counter-Reformation genre (e.g. Robert Southwell's ''Saint Peters Complaynt'') (227)

			c.f. ''Cooke-ham'' with Jonson's ''Penshurst''
			*" draw upon the same generic resources"; "they offer, as it were, a male and female conception of an idealized social order, which respond to contemporary ideology and which are epitomized in the lfie of a specific country house" (235)
			* "Lanyer's poem makes the pastoral departure a matter of social and domestic rather than state politics" (235)
			* Lanyer's poem "displays the real superimposed upon the ideal, affording a very different representation of the lady's situation. ... This poem gives mythic dimension to Lanyer's dominant concerns throughout the volume: this lost Eden was a female paradise and as such an ageless, classless society in which three women lived together in happy intimacy." (237)
			* "In sharpest contrast to Jonson's "Penshurst," whose lord "dwells" permanently within it and thereby preserves its quasi-Edenic beauty and harmony, Lanyer's "Cooke-ham" portrays the destruction of an idyllic place when its lady departs." (240)

			oak tree is only gendered male object in the poem (238)

			== Revising Genres and Claiming the Woman's Part: Mary Wroth's Oeuvre ==

			:"She used her heritage transgressively to replace heroes with heroines at the center of several major genres employed by the male Sidney authors, transforming their values and gender politics and exploring the poetics and situation of women writers."

			:"Wroth's originality resides in claiming the romance, the lyric sequence, and the pastoral drama as vehicles for exploring women's rather than men's consciousness and fantasies, and making all of those genres resonate against a Jacobean rather than an Elizabethan milieu." (244)

			Jonson's sonnet to Wroth (247)

Wtrettien: /* Resisting Tyrants: Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy and History */

2011-11-11T01:14:46Z