Grief and women writers in the English renaissance / Elizabeth Hodgson, University of British Columbia.

Grief and women writers in the English renaissance / Elizabeth Hodgson, University of British Columbia.

New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 2015.

x, 196 pages ; 24 cm

"Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance anatomizes the era's powerful but troubling links between the forgettable dead and the living mourners who are implicated in the same oblivion. Four major women writers from 1570 to 1670 construct these difficult bonds between the spectral dead and the liminal mourner. Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, reinvents the controversial substitutions of aristocratic funerals. New Protestant ideologies of the sainted dead connect devotional mourning and patronage in Aemelia Lanyer's writing. Mary Wroth's verse enacts a uniquely exalted, imaginative melancholy in which Jacobean subjects dissolve into their mourning artifacts. Among the precarious political mourners of the later half of the period, Katherine Philips's lyric verse plays the shell game of private grief. Forgetting, being forgotten, and being dead are risks that the dead and the living ironically share in these central texts by the English Renaissance's most illustrious women writers"-- Provided by publisher.

Machine generated contents note: 1. Inheriting loss: Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; 2. The golden chain: Aemelia Lanyer; 3. 'This testament of me': Mary Wroth's melancholic sonnets; 4. 'In every breast her monument': Katherine Philips.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

United States -- New York (State).

PR113 .H59 2015