Write or be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints

Although the field of early modern women's studies has blossomed in recent years, little attention has been paid to women poets of the period. This new collection is specifically designed to fill the gap, applying new critical methodologies and theories to this group of early modern writers. Write or Be Written also contributes to ongoing debates about canonicity, periodicity, disciplinarity, and the construction of knowledge.The essays in this volume reflect today's sophisticated critical thinking, and represent a broad range of approaches and methodologies. Topics covered include contextualizing the self; female discursive strategies; religious discourses and gender; writing a female space; negotiating power and desire; female writing and the marketplace/publishing; and revisions of male-dominated poetic conventions and traditions.

Ursula Appelt is an Assistant Professor of English literature at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Margaret J. M. Ezell is the John Paul Abbott Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas AandM University. Pamela Hammons is currently an Assistant Professor of English literature at the University of Central Florida. Margaret P. Hannay, Professor of English Literature at Siena College, Clare R. Kinney is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Joan Pong Linton is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University Jeslyn Medoff teaches American and British literature at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Shannon Miller is an Associate Professor of English at Temple University. Jacqueline Pearson is Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester, England. Bronwen Price is senior lecturer in English at Portsmouth University, England. Anne Russell is Associate Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada. Andrew Shifflett is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, Barbara Smith is Associate Professor of English at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale, New York. Helen Wilcox is Professor of English Literature at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.