Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture

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.

"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

• Prefatory Note Introduction Chapter 1: The Labyrinthine Baroque Chapter 2: The Female Baroque Chapter 3: Catholic Baroque Chapter 4: Protestant Baroque Chapter 5: The Female Baroque in Court and Country Chapter 6: Mary Wroth's Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus Chapter 7: From Baroque to Enlightenment: Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn Postscript Index