- Title
- Rethinking authorial reluctance in the paratexts to Anne Bradstreet's poetry
- Creator
- Pender, Patricia
- Relation
- Early modern women and the poem p. 165-180
- Relation
- http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719090721
- Publisher
- Manchester University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- Anne Bradstreet's professions of inadequacy in much-anthologised poems such as 'The author to her book' and 'The prologue' make her exemplary of the modesty we have come to expect of early modern women writers. Her renditions of abject humility before literary tradition, her apparent objection to putting herself forward in print and her professed inability to complete the poetic projects she undertook have all helped to enshrine her as the quintessential woman writer who would not, or could not, call herself a poet. This chapter reconsiders Bradstreet's now famous pronouncements of authorial reluctance in her two seventeenth century printed publications: The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, published ostensibly without her consent in London in 1650, and Several Poems, published six years after her death, but with material that she had clearly designed for publication, in Boston in 1678. If Bradstreet has traditionally been considered a prime example of the humble, submissive and self-effacing woman poet, this is partly due, I suggest, to overly literal readings of her modesty rhetoric and of the paratexts that accompanied her poetry into print. Reading these paratexts anew, and considering Bradstreet's modesty tropes as strategies of self-authorisation rather than heart felt pronouncements of inadequacy, reveals instead a seventeenth century female poet who was well versed in the specific literary traditions she selected to enter, effective in negotiating contemporary discourses of authorship and confident of her own claims to poetic skill and substance.
- Subject
- Anne Bradstreet; poetry; English poetry; female authors; seventeenth century poetry
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1059273
- Identifier
- uon:16558
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780719090721
- Language
- eng
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