Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"
Laura is an extraordinarily sustained, compelling, and critically resourceful reading of the lyric Petrarch and three of his major English successors. This book counts as a major revision of the critical discourse of ‘Petrarchanism.’ Estrin not only produces this critique, however; she clinches it with readings so concentrated, well-founded, and fully argued that her successors will have to meet a new standard of proof."—Jonathan Crewe, Dartmouth College
"Estrin’s readings are intricate and persuasive, and revealing. Her writing, at once deeply poetic and nuanced, is extremely clear. She argues for a kind of fluidity of the poetic subject that allows for gender crossings and transgressions; the resulting exploration of male subjectivity and feminine representations is immensely suggestive and potentially provocative."—Elizabeth D. Harvey, University of Western Ontario
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments xi
Note on Editions xiv
Introduction: Gender Performance and Genre Slippage 1
PETRARCH
Inverting the Order: Laura as Eve to Petrarch's Adam 41
"Like a Man Who Thinks and Weeps and Writes": Laura as Mercury to Petrarch's Battus 61
WYATT
Taking Bread: Wyatt's Revenge in the Lyrics and Sustenance in the Psalms 93
"Liking This": Telling Wyatt's Feelings 123
DONNE
Small Change: Defections from Petrarchan and Spenserian Poetics 149
Sylvia Transformed: Returning Donne's Gifts 180
"A Pregnant Bank": Contracting and Abstracting the "You" in Donne's "A Valediction of My Name in the Window" and "Elegy: Change" 201
MARVELL
"Busie Companies of Men": Appropriations of Female Power in "Damon the Mower" and "The Gallery" 227
"Preparing for Longer Flight": Marvell's Nymph and the Revenge of Silence 255
A-Mazing and A-Musing: After the Garden in "Appleton House" 278
Musing Afterward 304
Notes 319
Index 341
