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 poets and theorists of poetry as Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Abraham Cowley, and John Milton.

Scott-Baumann situates these women in the vanguard of the poetics of this period. Women who wrote theory and criticism—the forms that tell readers which writers to read and value—were among the leading voices defining poetic style and the place of poetry in society. Examining a wealth of critical writings by women, many of them newly found in prefaces and other paratextual works, Scott-Baumann shows that the history of style is also a history of exclusion and inclusion.

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