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

Barbara L. Estrin

Published by Duke University Press 1994

Laura

Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne and Marvell

Barbara L. Estrin
Edited by: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson

In the series Post-Contemporary Interventions

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822382256

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

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.

Reviews

"Laura is an extraordinarily sustained, compelling, and critically resourceful reading of the lyric Petrarch and three of his major English successors. This book counts as a major revision of the critical discourse of ‘Petrarchanism.’ Estrin not only produces this critique, however; she clinches it with readings so concentrated, well-founded, and fully argued that her successors will have to meet a new standard of proof."—Jonathan Crewe, Dartmouth College

"Estrin’s readings are intricate and persuasive, and revealing. Her writing, at once deeply poetic and nuanced, is extremely clear. She argues for a kind of fluidity of the poetic subject that allows for gender crossings and transgressions; the resulting exploration of male subjectivity and feminine representations is immensely suggestive and potentially provocative."—Elizabeth D. Harvey, University of Western Ontario

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Permission to quote from the following is gratefully acknowledged Publicly Available Download PDF	v
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Note on Editions Publicly Available Download PDF	xiv
Introduction: Gender Performance and Genre Slippage Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PETRARCH Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	39
WYATT Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	91
DONNE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	147
MARVELL Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225
Musing Afterward Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	304
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	319
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	341

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 360
Illustrations
- Other: 3 illustrations

eBook

Published: December 15, 1994
ISBN: 9780822382256