Early modern women's writing and the rhetoric of modesty

Resource Information

The work Early modern women's writing and the rhetoric of modesty represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Early modern women's writing and the rhetoric of modesty

Statement of responsibility

Patricia Pender

Creator

• Pender, Patricia

Subject

• English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism
• English literature -- Women authors | History and criticism
• Modesty in literature

Language

eng

Summary

An in-depth study of early modern women's modesty rhetoric from the English Reformation to the Restoration. This book provides new readings of modesty's gendered deployment in the works of Anne Askew, Katharine Parr, Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer and Anne Bradstreet.

Member of

• Early modern literature in history
• Online access with purchase: Palgrave Connect (Language & Linguistics Collection)

Cataloging source

UK-WkNB

Dewey number

820.99287

Index

no index present

Literary form

non fiction

Summary expansion

Why are the most famous examples of early modern women's writing professions of inadequacy, apology, and self-denigration? Why have we so frequently read these pronouncements as straightforward autobiographical assertions? Early Modern Women's Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty revisits the classic, even cliched trope of the woman writer's humility, rereading this familiar pose of abjection through the lenses of early modern rhetorical practice, protocols of early modern printed publication, and debates in contemporary feminist theory. In the process, the book provides provocative new readings of five now-prominent women writers -- Anne Askew, Katharine Parr, Mary Sidney Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer and Anne Bradstreet -- revealing the surprisingly assertive and ambitious subtexts of their conventional expressions of modesty. These readings challenge long-held assumptions of early modern women's authorial self-fashioning and examine the ways in which the figure of the woman writer and the category of gender continue to hold crucial, determining and fetishized positions in our prevailing models of literary history