Sex And Style

Many of the terms we use today to describe poetic style originated in the early modern period: original ideas, feminine rhyme, irregular rhythm, smooth verse. These terms were often wielded in negative and gendered ways--to write soft or irregular verses was said to be a feminine fault, and to write strong or original ones a masculine virtue. In Sex and Style, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann argues that the language of poetry was always gendered, in ways that devalued women poets and feminine style; and that women, writing despite--and against--this sexist rhetoric, were important theorists of literature. Scott-Baumann documents and analyzes texts by women literary theorists, including Anne Southwell, Lucy Hutchinson, Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn, and puts their writings into dialogue with such well-known early modern poets and theorists of poetry as Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Abraham Cowley, and John Milton. Scott-Baumann situates these women in the vanguard of the poetics of this period. Women who wrote theory and criticism--the forms that tell readers which writers to read and value--were among the leading voices defining poetic style and the place of poetry in society. Examining a wealth of critical writings by women, many of them newly found in prefaces and other paratextual works, Scott-Baumann shows that the history of style is also a history of exclusion and inclusion.