Overview

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture is a contribution to the revival of early modern women's writings and cultural production in English that began in the 1980s. Its originality is twofold: it links women's writing in English with the wider context of Baroque culture, and it introduces the issue of gender into discussion of the Baroque. The title comes from Julia Kristeva's study of Teresa of Avila, that 'the secrets of Baroque civilization are female'. The book is built on a schema of recurring Baroque characteristics — narrativity, hyperbole, melancholia, kitsch, and plateauing, pointing less to surface manifestations and more to underlying ideological tensions. The crucial concept of the book is developed in detail. Particular attention is given to Gertrude More, Mary Ward, Aemilia Lanyer, The Ferrar/Collet women, Mary Wroth, the Cavendish sisters, Hester Pulter, Anne Hutchinson, and finally Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn, whose lives and writings point to the developing cultural transition to the Enlightenment.

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9781041187844

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Reviews

Some books feel as if they have always been there and when they appear we wonder how we did without them. This is one of those. In a wide-ranging study, Gary Waller explores the Baroque less as a historical period than as a sense of permanent disruptiveness that recurs throughout history, and often cyclically (19).- Catherine Bates, University of Warwick, Renaissance Quarterly, Volume LXXV, No. 1 (2022), There is much to celebrate in Gary Waller's new book The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, which I read with constant interest, even fascination. As its title indicates, the study refuses the common fragmentation of the early modern period into pre- and post-civil wars and ranges from the poetry, plays, and fiction of Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, and Mary Wroth to that of Margaret Cavendish (and her stepdaughters Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley) and Aphra Behn. [...] In this fascinating book, Waller has contributed richly to the shared endeavor to find and understand lost women's writing. Readers of many kinds will find much to learn from Waller's work.- Elaine Hobby, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Volume 40, Number 2, Fall 2021

Author Information

Gary Waller is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies Emeritus, Purchase College, SUNY. His books include English Poetry in the Sixteenth Century, The Sidney Family Romance, Walsingham and the English Imagination, The Annunciation: A Cultural History, The Virgin Mary in Medieval and Early Modern Literature and Popular Culture, and The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture.

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