The right to write
Subtitle: the literary politics of Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley
By: Kathrynn Seidler Engberg
Publisher: University Press of America
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Lanham, MD
Language: eng
Number of pages: 89
ISBN-13: 9780761846093; 9780761846109
Description: "The Right to Write examines how the early American poets Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley gained agency within a traditionally patriarchal field of literary production. Tracing the careers of Bradstreet and Wheatley through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Engberg shows that these women used their positions within society to network themselves into publication. Each woman represents a unique way in which a majority of early American women negotiated their roles as both women and writers while influencing the political and social fabric of the new republic. Examining the context in which these women worked, Engberg provides a window into the social conditions and aesthetic decisions they negotiated in order to write. This is not simply a historical and literary examination of the field of literary production; this study provides new conceptions of early American women's writing that are valuable to feminist inquiry. Engberg's research is innovative and recaptures a part of early American literary history."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pp. 81-84) and index.
Table of contents: title: Remember the ladies; title: Anne Bradstreet: with her "owne sweet hand"; title: To be a woman in print: prefatory politics; title: From coterie to print: the promiscuity of public exchange; title: "To play the rex"; title: Vexed by vanity, she speaks her mind; title: Phillis Wheatley: she must "be refin'd, and join th' angelic train"; title: To be a slave in print: prefatory politics; title: The power of passivity: Phillis's poetics; title: "In vain the feather'd warblers sing"; title: Remember the ladies: female poets in nineteenth century America.