Dianne Mitchell – författare

This collection demonstrates how, in early modern literary studies, close reading has its greatest force when we bring our attentive practices of textual analysis not only to the form but also the matter of our texts. The short, innovative essays included in this collection use original research to show how both form and materiality in the early modern period are inextricably bound up with each other, as well as with questions of embodiment and exclusion, sexual desire and colonial thinking. The essays illuminate the conditions of how we do early modern studies now, from issues about archival access in the postcolonial world to the core practices on which our discipline is based. Literary Form After Matter provides a defence of the shared, detailed attention that the practice of close reading demands, and the rich rewards it can offer.

An exploration of how everyday Renaissance practices of folding, sending, archiving, and arranging manuscript poetry created lyric intimacyPaper 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.