Abstract
Original ideas. Muscular prose. Heroic couplets. Virtuosic performance. Smooth lines. Feminine rhyme. Difficult syntax.
What do the words we use to describe poetry tell us about our literary history? How do these terms make that history? How is the story of style also one of bodies? Sex and Style reveals how many of the principles which underpin the history of poetry, and terms we still use today, are fundamentally gendered. Principles which still dominate our language of literary value, such as originality, are often seen as developed by a lineage of male poets, from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Milton and on into modernity. Sex and Style is as much interested in creating a new literary history as in revealing its existing biases. Through a little-known archive of manuscript writings by women, Sex and Style shows that women in fact at the vanguard of poetics, with originality, for instance, pioneered by seventeenth-century women poets ahead of their male peers.
What do the words we use to describe poetry tell us about our literary history? How do these terms make that history? How is the story of style also one of bodies? Sex and Style reveals how many of the principles which underpin the history of poetry, and terms we still use today, are fundamentally gendered. Principles which still dominate our language of literary value, such as originality, are often seen as developed by a lineage of male poets, from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Milton and on into modernity. Sex and Style is as much interested in creating a new literary history as in revealing its existing biases. Through a little-known archive of manuscript writings by women, Sex and Style shows that women in fact at the vanguard of poetics, with originality, for instance, pioneered by seventeenth-century women poets ahead of their male peers.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Princeton University Press |
| Publication status | Accepted/In press - 7 Jun 2024 |