Contains literary biographies of the first generation of seventeenth-century nondramatic poets - born before the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and dead before the execution of King Charles I in 1649.

As the twelve original essays collected in this volume demonstrate, to study the wit of seventeenth-century poetry is necessarily to address concerns at the very heart of the period's shifting literary culture. It is a topic that raises persistent questions of thematics and authorial intent, even as it interrogates a wide spectrum of cultural practices. These essays by some of the most renowned scholars in seventeenth-century studies illuminate important authors and engage issues of politics and religion, of secular and sacred love, of literary theory and poetic technique, of gender relations and historical consciousness, of literary history and social change, as well as larger concerns of literary production and smaller ones of local effects. Collectively, they illustrate the vitality of the topic, both in its own right and as a means of understanding the complexity and range of seventeenth-century English poetry.

The first comprehensive anthology of seventeenth-century English women writers

Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain offers a new account of women's engagement in the poetic and political cultures of seventeenth-century England and Scotland, based on poetry that was produced and circulated in manuscript. Katherine Philips is often regarded as the first in a cluster of women writers, including Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn, who were political, secular, literary, print-published, and renowned. Sarah C. E. Ross explores a new corpus of political poetry by women, offering detailed readings of Elizabeth Melville, Anne Southwell, Jane Cavendish, Hester Pulter, and Lucy Hutchinson, and making the compelling case that female political poetics emerge out of social and religious poetic modes and out of manuscript-based authorial practices. Situating each writer in her political and intellectual contexts, from early covenanting Scotland to Restoration England, this volume explores women's political articulation in the devotional lyric, biblical verse paraphrase, occasional verse, elegy, and emblem. For women, excluded from the public-political sphere, these rhetorically-modest genres and the figural language of poetry offered vital modes of political expression; and women of diverse affiliations use religious and social poetics, the tropes of family and household, and the genres of occasionality that proliferated in manuscript culture to imagine the state. Attending also to the transmission and reception of women's poetry in networks of varying reach, Sarah C. E. Ross reveals continuities and evolutions in women's relationship to politics and poetry, and identifies a female tradition of politicised poetry in manuscript spanning the decades before, during, and after the Civil Wars.

The Reader's Guide to British History is the essential source to secondary material on British history. This resource contains over 1,000 A-Z entries on the history of Britain, from ancient and Roman Britain to the present day. Each entry lists 6-12 of the best-known books on the subject, then discusses those works in an essay of 800 to 1,000 words prepared by an expert in the field. The essays provide advice on the range and depth of coverage as well as the emphasis and point of view espoused in each publication.

Devoted exclusively to women poets, this volume in the Undergraduate Companion Series presents students with an abundance of important resources necessary for 21st-century literary research. The most authoritative, informative, and useful Web sites and print resources have carefully been selected and compiled in a bibliographic guide to the introductory works of 221 women poets who write in English or have works available in English translation. Representing more than 25 nationalities worldwide, the women included in this volume have each contributed significantly to the genre of poetry. For each author you will find concise lists of the best Web sites and printed sources, including biographies, criticisms, dictionaries, handbooks, indexes, concordances, journals, and bibliographies.

Jane Barker (1652-1732) is increasingly being recognised as one of the most important English women writers of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. The author of both poems and novels (including novels containing numerous poems), Barker was largely ignored for many years but has recently been the subject of intense interest and investigation. Despite this, no complete, collected edition of Barker's poems has yet appeared, and the present volume is the first reproduction of her important early published volume, Poetical Recreations, to be issued in facsimile as a printed book (rather than on microfilm). Jane Barker's life was rich in incident. Her early poetry was enthusiastically advocated by the male students at St. John's College, Cambridge. A persecuted Catholic and a subsequent longtime exiled supporter of the Jacobite cause in France following the 'Bloodless Revolution', she was also physically disabled and without great financial means, in part because she never married. Almost certainly her decision to begin publishing novels was motivated, on some level, by financial need. By the time she died, in March 1732, at the age of seventy-nine, she had lived a life that had been long, eventful, and accomplished, but by no means easy.