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This anthology brings together extensive selections of poetry by the five most prolific and prominent women poets of the English Civil War period: Anne Bradstreet, Hester Pulter, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson. It presents these poems in modern-spelling, clear-text versions for classroom use, and for ready comparison to mainstream editions of male poets’ work. The anthology reveals the diversity of women’s poetry in the mid-seventeenth century, across political affiliations and forms of publication. Notes on the poems and an introduction explain the contexts of Civil War, religious conflict, and scientific and literary development. The anthology enables a more comprehensive understanding of seventeenth-century women’s poetic culture, both in its own right and in relation to prominent male poets such as Marvell, Milton and Dryden.

Hester Pulter's poetry engages deeply in the mode of complaint, the amplified, open-ended expression of woe that marks the Ovidian-inflected poetry of Spenser, Drayton, Shakespeare, and others. Pulter's Civil War political lyrics are taking a central place in critical literature on women writers of female-voiced complaint, but her poetry draws attention to another lacuna in discussions of the mode: the exploration of religious versions of early modern complaint. This article reads Pulter's devotional lyrics in relation to their poetic models and precedents, especially the Sidney Psalms and the devotional lyrics of George Herbert. It seeks simultaneously to explore Pulter's devotional lyrics as complaints, and to trace the affective function of complaint in the mid-seventeenth century devotional lyric, in which complaint so often gives way—or is actively turned—to praise. Pulter's devotional complaints, it argues, correlate closely to those of George Herbert, whose influences are verbal, formal, and affective. Extending Herbert's sense of \"Complaining\" in his lyric of that name, and his imagery of winged ascent and heavenly song, Pulter's devotional lyrics move repeatedly through an affective fall and flight, and from the virtuosic amplification of woe to the anticipation of \"heavenly lays\" without end.

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) has fed almost a century of work on the material conditions of early modern women's lives and their modes of expression. But as Diane Purkiss's essay in the Times Literary Supplement in February 2019 makes all too clear, there are collateral dangers in the tenacity of Woolf's essay as the enduring narrative for early modern women's writing, with its implications of isolation and quietude, and separate spheres, interests, and influences. This essay offers an alternative metaphor, one of “a small room with large windows,” for the global scholarly field that is early modern women's writing. It questions narratives of critical backwardness and belatedness, and looks instead to the positive achievements and influences of feminist scholarship in the last several decades. It argues that the metaphors we use to describe our scholarship matter: they contest and construct “which world we want: the one that already exists, or the one that might,” to borrow the words of Amia Srinivasan. It suggests the need to keep building on what has already been achieved and to keep shifting our standpoints and our perspectives, seeking “to recognize / The whole three hundred and sixty degrees” of early modern experience and expression.

Early modern women’s poetry tends to be read in one of two prevailing critical paradigms. On the one hand, much important scholarship emphasizes revision, augmentation, and the malleability of women’s manuscript texts. On the other, print editions of women’s texts are celebrated as landmarks; print publication, in this view, bestows new qualities of posterity, stability, and fixity. This essay reinterrogates these paradigms of malleability in manuscript and fixity in print. Focusing on the variant print editions of poetry by Katherine Philips, Anne Bradstreet, and Margaret Cavendish, it reveals a complex contingency to women’s printed poetic texts and, in doing so, reassesses women poets’ relationship to seventeenth-century print culture.

Written by some of the world's finest contemporary literature specialists, the newly commissioned essays in this volume examine the work of more than twenty major British novelists: Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Iain (M.) Banks, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Janice Galloway, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Kelman, A.L. Kennedy, Hanif Kureishi, Ian McEwan, Caryl Philips, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Graham Swift, Rose Tremain, Marina Warner, Irvine Welsh and Jeanette Winterson. The book will be of interest not only to students, teachers and lecturers, but to the general reader seeking help in approaching the often baffling novels of the recent past. Key Features Literary critical 'isms' are described in clear, jargon-free language. Focuses on British fiction since 1980 giving coverage of established authors such as Angela Carter and Ian McEwan as well as little addressed novelists such as James Kelman and Zadie Smith. Essays are by leading scholars in contemporary fiction.

The lyrics in manuscript that Jamie Reid-Baxter has attributed to Elizabeth Melville, the Scottish religious poet and author ofAne Godlie Dreame(1603), include three sequences of religious sonnets, a poetic genre around which there clusters a language of ‘firsts’ in literary-critical discussion of the period. Anne Lock’sA Meditation of a Penitent Sinner(1560), a sequence of religious sonnets that paraphrase and expand on Psalm 51, has received extensive critical attention in recent years as ‘the first sonnet sequence in English’: to that distinction can be added (and frequently is) those of being a religious sonnet sequence, and of