This course takes seriously the socioeconomic, cultural, religious, and physical restrictions placed on women writing in the 16th and 17th centuries. Through a selection of literary works, we will examine the ways in which early modern women exercised considerable authorial agency in the poetic-fashioning of the literary tropes, genres, and forms of thought that they inherited. Often re-forming, reinventing, revising, and re-imagining poetic spaces, these women developed their own styles of critique and creation from within their historically specific concerns. This course recovers works that were frequently written out of the study of the early modern during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in order to grapple with the imaginative voices of women writing under the constraints of their time. |