Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry : Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre.

Intro -- 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 -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- Y.

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.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.