- Title
- The Critical Fortunes of the Tenth Muse: Canonicity and its Discontents
- Creator
- Pender, Patricia
- Relation
- A History of Early Modern Women's Writing p. 66-82
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781316480267
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Anne Bradstreet's poetic career has signaled a profound investment in the idea of a female canon, from the title of her first volume of poetry, The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America, to the 1970s feminist reclamation of her "personal" poetry, and the current century's revivification of her "political" interests. Each major movement in Bradstreet's critical reception has paid deliberate attention to the ways in which her poetry subverts or re-inscribes different orthodoxies in literary history - both historical and current. This confluence of concerns, and the dramatically divergent results they have produced, makes Bradstreet an ideal subject for examining the notion of a female canon in early modern women's writing. Against what did the notion of a female canon oppose itself in the seventeenth century, and against which critical traditions has this same notion been harnessed in subsequent literary criticism? A transhistorical examination of Bradstreet's critical reception (even one as abbreviated as this chapter can provide) offers insights into canon building (and dismantling) from a unique perspective: Bradstreet is at one an obvious anomaly, a clear contender for canonicity, and a test case from which arguments about subversion and orthodoxy in early modern women's writing continue to flourish.
- Subject
- Anne Bradstreet; women's writing; female canon; poetry
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1442282
- Identifier
- uon:41641
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781316480267
- Language
- eng
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