Sex and Style: Literary Criticism and Gender in Early Modern England

A new literary history that places women writers at the center of poetic theory and practice in English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

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 v...