Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, And The Canon; Editor: Grossman, Marshall; Hardback; Book

Editor: Grossman, Marshall
Hardback; Book
264 pages
The University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813120497

Aemilia Lanyer was a middle-class Londoner of Jewish-Italian descent and the mistress of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chamberlain. But she is remembered today as the first Englishwoman to publisha substantial volume of original poems (1611).Her output is varied, subtle, provocative, and witty. The essays in this volume establish the intrinsic merit of Lanyer's poetry and use her work to interrogate that of her male contemporaries, Donne, Jonson, and Shakespeare. As a whole the collection offers a sustained discussion of the processes of canonization and the construction of literary history.For this first booklength study of Lanyer's work, Marshall Grossman has assembled a stellar group of Renaissance scholars, including Boyd Berry, David Bevington, Leeds Barroll, Achsah GuibboryRenaissance scholars seek to establish Lanyer (1569-1645) as a major literary figure not simply by recovering a woman's voice, but by rewriting literary history into a shape than includes her and alters how we read her male contemporaries such as Donne, Shakespeare, and Jonson. They look at who she