Pamela S. Hammons
Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric.
Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002. First edition.
0754607801 ix/188 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.5" x 9", is bound in black cloth,
with stamped silver lettering to spine. Book and dust jacket are like
new.
Pamela Hammons' study contributes to the booming field of early modern
women writers by contextualizing and analyzing a unique configuration
of underexamined women's texts. By examining how seventeenth-century
English women's composition of lyrics intersects significantly with
the social experiences of the writers, this book challenges
assumptions that have limited the study of early modern women's
writing and reveals the power of lyrics in women's reconceiving or
changing of their positions in society. Here Hammons reconsiders how
generic conventions were employed as a means by which women writers
could borrow from socially sanctioned poetic traditions to express
potentially subversive views of their social roles as mothers,
religious leaders, widows, and poets. Although the narrative
concentrates on early modern lyrics, it also treats contemporary
plays, epics, prose polemics, conversion narratives, religious
treatises, newsbook articles, and Biblical texts in building its
arguments.The study focuses on the social dimension of women's writing
when that writing seems especially insular and when it does not fit
neatly into the patterns of interaction predominantly followed by male
writers. She reveals how-despite their appearances of self-enclosure-
these poems enable their respective poets to rethink or even change
their respective positions in society, and to add their own
innovations to the history of the lyric. Hammons combines her study of
the poetry of such figures as Katherine Philips and Aemilia Lanyer
with that of the less well known Mary Carey and Gertrude Aston
Thimelby; she engages with canonical male poets such as Ben Jonson and
John Milton, as well as with little known ones such as George Payler
and Vavasor Powell.Hammons demonstrates how seventeenth-century
women's composition of lyrics intersects significantly with the social
experiences of these women. She describes how Mary Carey, through her
child loss poetry, resists the blame her society ascribed to mothers
of dead children. She discusses how Anna Trapnel strategically uses
her psalm-singing to present herself, in public, as a preacher. And
she outlines how the widow Katherine Austen-whose 35 poems in her Book
M have not before received significant scholarly attention, but which
expand and complicate current knowledge about early modern women's
reading and writing practices-employs her lyrics to oppose her
culture's pervasive demonization of widows.This study engages
extensively with issues concerning manuscript and social texts in the
context of print culture through the close examination of a variety of
textual practices. It provides a thorough yet subtle grounding in
recent feminist criticism, the social history of the family, and the
history of authorship practices.