Sex and Style : Literary Criticism and Gender in Early Modern England

A new literary history that places women writers at the center of poetic theory and practice in English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Many of the terms we use today to describe poetic style originated in the early modern period: original ideas, feminine rhyme, irregular rhythm, smooth verse.These terms were often wielded in negative and gendered ways-to write soft or irregular verses was said to be a feminine fault, and to write strong or original ones a masculine virtue.In Sex and Style, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann argues that the language of poetry was always gendered, in ways that devalued women poets and feminine style; and that women, writing despite-and against-this sexist rhetoric, were important theorists of literature.Scott-Baumann documents and analyzes texts by women literary theorists, including Anne Southwell, Lucy Hutchinson, Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn, and puts their writings into dialogue with such well-known early modern p