Lara Dodds – författare

Early Modern Women's Writing and the Future of Literary History demonstrates that a full accounting of early modern women's literary and creative activities is necessary to the future of literary studies writ large. Despite benefiting from a rich body of scholarship and diverse critical practices, early modern women's writing is still treated as an optional or secondary component of Renaissance literary studies as a whole. In this book, Dodds and Dowd offer a state-of-the-field assessment of the critical and theoretical debates that have resulted in this state of affairs in order to advance specific visions for the future. Dodds and Dowd examine how perennial questions about authorship, canon, and literary value have historically influenced scholarship on early modern women's writing and its place within literary studies. Early modern women's writing has been perceived as belated, out of sync with dominant critical trends. Dodds and Dowd show the belatedness of early modern women's writing to be a "happy accident" that positions women's writing as a resource for the renewal of literary history. In both the classroom and in scholarship, early modern women's writing shows the way forward for the field, whether in the revitalization of formalist approaches to literature through an alliance with feminism or in the integration of newer critical methodologies such as premodern critical race studies. This book demonstrates that a feminist literary history that places women's writing at its center is essential to the future of English Renaissance literary studies. There is, in other words, no history of English Renaissance literature without women writers.

Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women’s Writing reexamines the relationship between gender and form in early modern women’s writing in essays that elaborate the specific literary strategies of women writers, that examine women’s debts to and appropriations of different literary genres, and that offer practical suggestions for the teaching of women’s texts in several different contexts. Contributors explore the possibility of feminist formalism, a methodology that both attends to the structural, rhetorical, and other formal techniques of a given text and takes gender as a central category of analysis. This collection contends that feminist formalism is a useful tool for scholars of the early modern period and for literary studies more broadly because it marries the traditional questions of formalism-including questions of style, genre, and literary history-with the political and cultural concerns of feminist inquiry.Contributors reposition works by important women writers-such as Margaret Cavendish, Hester Pulter, Mary Wroth, and Katherine Philips-as central to the development of English literary tradition. By examining a variety of texts written by women, including recipes, emblems, exchanges, and poetry, Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women’s Writing contributes to existing scholarship on early modern women’s writing while extending it in new and important directions.