Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne and Marvell

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Duke University Press, 15/12/1994 - 345 páginas
How do men imagine women? In the poetry of Petrarch and his English successors—Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell—the male poet persistently imagines pursuing a woman, Laura, whom he pursues even as she continues to deny his affections. Critics have long held that, in objectifying Laura, these male-authored texts deny the imaginative, intellectual, and physical life of the woman they idealize. In Laura, Barbara L. Estrin counters this traditional view by focusing not on the generative powers of the male poet, but on the subjectivity of the imagined woman and the imaginative space of the poems she occupies.
Through close readings of the Rime sparse and the works of Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell, Estrin uncovers three Lauras: Laura-Daphne, who denies sexuality; Laura-Eve, who returns the poet’s love; and Laura-Mercury, who reinvents her own life. Estrin claims that in these three guises Laura subverts both genre and gender, thereby introducing multiple desires into the many layers of the poems. Drawing upon genre and gender theories advanced by Jean-François Lyotard and Judith Butler to situate female desire in the poem’s framework, Estrin shows how genre and gender in the Petrarchan tradition work together to undermine the stability of these very concepts.
Estrin’s Laura constitutes a fundamental reconceptualization of the Petrarchan tradition and contributes greatly to the postmodern reassessment of the Renaissance period. In its descriptions of how early modern poets formulate questions about sexuality, society and poetry, Laura will appeal to scholars of the English and Italian Renaissance, of gender studies, and of literary criticism and theory generally.

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Índice

Laura as Eve to Petrarchs Adam
41
LIKE A MAN WHO THINKS AND WEEPS AND WRITES
61
Wyatts Revenge in the Lyrics and Sustenance in the Psalms
93
Telling Wyatts Feelings
123
Defections from Petrarchan and Spenserian Poetics
149
Returning Donnes Gifts
180
Contracting and Abstracting the You in Donnes A Valediction of My Name in the Window and Elegy Change
201
Appropriations of Female Power in Damon the Mower and The Gallery
227
Marvells Nymph and the Revenge of Silence
255
After the Garden in Appleton House
278
MUSING AFTERWARD
304
NOTES
319
INDEX
339
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Página 335 - Am I That Name?" Feminism and the Category of 'Women...

Acerca do autor (1994)

Barbara L. Estrin is Professor of English at Stonehill College in North Easton, Massachusetts. She is the author of The Raven and the Lark: Lost Children in Literature of the English Renaissance.

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