Overview

An exploration of how everyday Renaissance practices of folding, sending, archiving, and arranging manuscript poetry created lyric intimacy Paper Intimacies in the Early Modern Lyric explores how everyday Renaissance practices of folding, sending, archiving, and arranging manuscript poetry informed how their authors imagined possibilities for nearness and desire. Demonstrating that the processes that shape a poem's creation, transmission, and reception constitute an integral part of the lyric genre, Dianne Mitchell exposes the intimate work produced by the interaction of poetic form and physical matter in early modern lyric. Following the busy lives of poems as handmade artifacts, Mitchell tracks three key moments in the material life of Renaissance lyric: its creation in the new domestic site of the closet, its transmission to readers via a postal intermediary, and its long-term storage in the pages of a manuscript book. Wedding the study of the material text and the history of sexuality with close readings of poetry by John Donne, Mary Wroth, Hester Pulter, William Shakespeare, and others, Mitchell shows how form's entanglement with routine activities such as epistolary correspondence and inventorying household goods shaped the terms by which lyric created closeness across distance, across household spaces, and across time. Paper Intimacies in the Early Modern Lyric reconceives notions of what lyric poetry is and what it looks like in the early modern era, revealing a lyric intimacy that proves stranger and more expansive than we have presumed.

Full Product Details

9781512829402

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Reviews

""Dianne Mitchell brilliantly gives new meaning to the longstanding tradition of close reading by turning to handwritten lyric poetry, retheorizing what 'close' and 'closeness' mean --both in terms of intimacy and of reading items adjacent to each other in their original locales. The result is an innovative and portable theory of lyric closeness that will enrich our understanding of the phenomenological experience of reading and transmitting poetry.""-- ""Wendy Wall, Northwestern University"" ""Paper Intimacies is an exciting study of lyric verse and ideas of intimacy that pays attention to the materialities of lyric composition, copying, and transmission. Dianne Mitchell's arresting readings offer a sustained and profound re-thinking of how lyric poems work.""-- ""Adam Smyth, author of The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in 18 Lives""

Author Information

Dianne Mitchell is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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