Browsing by Author "Werlin, Julianne"

This dissertation examines the collaborative poetry and poetics of four early modern women writers: Mary Sidney Herbert (1561-1621), Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645), Katherine Philips (1631-1664) and Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656 – 1710). It critically recovers women’s poetry and their different modes of literary collaboration at the same time as it explores their unique manuscript and print practices. The critical methods employed are primarily historicist and formal and founded on close reading of revision processes, literary source materials and formal poetics. Additionally, each chapter argues that the contexts of relationship and community are integral to understanding how women writers employed collaborative writing practices as well as the significance of collaboration as an alternative to competition. I conclude that, across the long seventeenth century, the intellectual social agency of women writers grows through their collaborative writing practices, evidenced by publication and print.

This study locates a medieval poetics of lineation in the manuscript and early print reception of fifteenth-century Middle English penitential poems. I investigate three exemplary poems of penitential devotion alongside modern theories of the poetic line, combining approaches from cultural studies, reception theory, and material poetics to show how the poetic line shaped medieval readers’ perception of reality and orientation within social networks. When played to full effect, the poetic line, I contend, is like light: both particle (complete in itself) and wave (moving toward transfer). In Lines of Relation I argue that the energetic shimmer of the poetic line presented medieval readers with a way to face their own limits as well as their ongoing responsibilities to and for others.

In my introduction chapter, I excavate Middle English discourses of line and relation in the context of penitential practice and the explosive vernacularization of Latin writings in late medieval England. I then draw on my archival research of devotional poems in fifteenth-century manuscripts and early print books to analyze the linear workings of three poems for penitential introspection and ethical sensitization: John Lydgate’s Kalendare (which I discuss in chapter 2), Thomas Brampton’s Penitential Psalm paraphrase (chapter 3), and the anonymous Passion complaint “Wyth scharpe thornes,” (chapter 4). These are rhyming Middle English prayers, psalms, and meditations that were popular enough to appear, collectively, in in approximately thirty surviving late medieval English books. Rather than viewing these texts as mere scripts or instructional aids, we can understand them first and foremost as poems inviting active interpretive engagement on the part of the reader. What unites these texts under the banner of penitential labor, I show, is their use of the poetic line as a form prompting readers to explore, at once, personal limit and limitless social responsibility. As I argue in the Coda, these considerations of line, limit, and conscience continue in poems by present-day writers of color in the United States. Like the poetic forms of penance in the medieval texts I examine, poems by Lucille Clifton and Thomas Sayers Ellis entangle the reader in linear interactions that insist on literary reception as a site for moral awareness and action.

Lines of Relation aims to increase appreciation for the basic scope for conceptual, expressive, and ethical work that medieval poetic forms made available to their audiences—and as a result to enrich and refine responses to the ethical demands these forms’ continuance make in literary reception today.

“The Invention of Rhythm” dismantles the foundational myth of modern English verse. It considers its two protagonists, Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who together brought English poetry out of the middle ages: the latter taking the former’s experiments with Romance language verse forms and smoothing them into the first sustained examples of the iambic measures that would so strongly influence the Elizabethans, and in turn dominate English poetry until the coming of Modernism in the twentieth century. It considers their contrastively-oscillating critical reputations from the seventeenth century to the present day, focusing on how historically-contingent aesthetic and socio-political values have been continuously brought to bear on studies of their respective versification, in fact producing, and perpetuating the mythological narrative, with negligable study of the linguistic and rhythmical patterns of their poems themselves.

It reconsiders their writing, in context of their manuscripts and the anthology by which they were received for most of this time, Tottel’s Miscellany, and through statistically-driven orthographic and paleographic analyses of over a half-dozen early- to mid-sixteenth-century manuscripts, as well as extensive historical, philological and grammatical comparisons, exhaustive stemmatological and polygenous derivational models, and several newly-developed analytical techniques, argues against the persistent Great Men narrative in favor of a democratic, collaborative picture of the invention of modern English versification.

Finally, it presents a complete, transparent prosodic analysis of the over 3,200 lines of Wyatt and Surrey's verse in Tottel’s, and through statistical and philological analyses, demonstrates the congeniality of their received verses, their structural differences invented and exaggerated by the extra-prosodic studies that imagined, adjusted to their own ends, and continue to perpetuate the myth.