Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry

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Elizabeth D. Harvey, Katharine Eisaman Maus
University of Chicago Press, Aug 10, 1990 - Literary Criticism - 351 pages
This collection gathers new essays by critics and scholars who are currently reshaping our sense of the function and nature of seventeenth-century poetry. Contributors return to the New Critical canon of Renaissance poetry with fresh perspectives that emphasize considerations of gender, ideology, power, and language.

In the first group of essays, David Norbrook, Annabel Patterson, John Guillory, Rosemary Kegl, and Stephen Orgel explore the various ways in which a text can be "political." Next, Arthur Marotti, Jane Tylus, and Jonathan Goldberg consider the circumstances of textual production and reception in the seventeenth century. Finally, Stanley Fish, Gordon Braden, Michael C. Schoenfeldt, and Maureen Quilligan discuss the particular forms of anxiety that result when seventeenth-century poets modify the traditional rhetoric of sexual desire to serve what seem to be erotic or religious purposes.

These essays, accompanied by an extensive editors' introduction, intersect less in their shared enthusiasm for particular authors or interpretative methods than in a common interest in particular critical issues. They present the most exciting work by critics redefining Renaissance studies.
 

Contents

The Monarchy of Wit and the Republic of Letters Donnes Politics
3
All Donne
37
From the Superfluous to the Supernumerary Reading Gender into Paradise Lost
68
Joyning my Labour to my Pain The Politics of Labor in Marvells Mower Poems
89
Jonson and the Amazons
119
Shakespeares Sonnets as Literary Property
143
Jacobean Poetry and Lyric Disappointment
174
Dating Milton
199
Masculine Persuasive Force Donne and Verbal Power
223
Unspeakable Love Petrarch to Herbert
253
That Ancient Heat Sexuality and Spirituality in The Temple
273
The Constant Subject Instability and Female Authority in Wroths Urania Poems
307
List of Contributors
337
Index of Names
341
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About the author (1990)

Elizabeth D. Harvey is professor emeritus of English at the University of Toronto, a literary critic, and a psychoanalyst. She is the author or editor of several books, most recently Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture: Thresholds of History.

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