Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 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

About the Author

Barbara L. Estrin is Professor of English at Stonehill College in North Easton, Massachusetts. She is the author of The Raven and the Lark: Lost Children in Literature of the English Renaissance.

Reviews

"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