Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance
Cambridge University Press, 11/20/2014
EAN 9781107079984, ISBN10: 1107079985
Hardcover, 206 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance anatomizes the era's powerful but troubling links between the forgettable dead and the living mourners who are implicated in the same oblivion. Four major women writers from 1570 to 1670 construct these difficult bonds between the spectral dead and the liminal mourner. Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, reinvents the controversial substitutions of aristocratic funerals. New Protestant ideologies of the sainted dead connect devotional mourning and patronage in Aemelia Lanyer's writing. Mary Wroth's verse enacts a uniquely exalted, imaginative melancholy in which Jacobean subjects dissolve into their mourning artifacts. Among the precarious political mourners of the later half of the period, Katherine Philips's lyric verse plays the shell game of private grief. Forgetting, being forgotten, and being dead are risks that the dead and the living ironically share in these central texts by the English Renaissance's most illustrious women writers.
1. Inheriting loss
Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
2. The golden chain
Aemelia Lanyer
3. 'This testament of me'
Mary Wroth's melancholic sonnets
4. 'In every breast her monument'
Katherine Philips.