Early Modern Women Writers Making Trouble
Woman-identified writers of the English Renaissance in many fascinating ways both disturb and amplify the public discourses of their eras. They write into emergent Reformed nationalism and empire, speak for and against class hierarchies, create and subvert a politics of dissent, and reimagine authority. These writers thus intervene in the major narratives of this century: the Protestant Reformation; English nation- and empire-building; civil and regional wars–as they also build new literary alliances, new communities of readers, and new genres. This seminar will encounter a series of major English women writers from 1580-1680 and explore how they speak into their publics.
Perspectives:
This course will implicitly challenge Habermas’ history of an emergent public sphere: whose politics, which publics?
We will use queer theory historians to study the roles of gender-identity and sexuality in these writers and in this era.
We will deploy scholarship on early English racialization to analyze the emergent colonialism and nationalism in which these writers operate.
Authors and Issues
- Mary Sidney Herbert (Psalms & dedicatory poems): scriptural nationalism
- Amelia Lanyer (Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum): women’s alliances & class-politics
- Mary Wroth (Pamphilia to Amphilanthus; Urania): desire, nostalgia, eco-politics
- Katherine Philips (Collected Poems; Letters): Royalist politics & female alliances
- Elizabeth Cary, Tragedy of Mariam: White Feminism & marriage-policy
- Margaret Cavendish, Convent of Pleasure: female pleasures, feminine communities
- Mary Rowlandson (Sovereignty and Goodness of God): captivity narratives, early settler colonization
- Margaret Fell (Women’s Speaking Justified): Quakers, revolution, & women’s spiritual voices
Course-Organization: We will all be responsible for our collective learning in every class, since that’s how a seminar works. Graduate courses are also professional training grounds in which you become practiced in scholarly genres and modes. All of the scaffolded course-work (article reviews, a presentation, a research project, weekly discussions) will facilitate our community of learning and your own growing professional skills.