Publicação
Refashioning english estate as feminine paradise: Aemilia Lanyer’s country-house poem “The Description of Cookham” (1610)
| Resumo: | This article proposes to investigate an elegiac poem, “The Description of Cookham”, which Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645) wrote and published in 1610-11 at the request of her patron Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland – the first estate poem in English literary history and the first written by a woman. Property assumed a central role in the concepts of self and society, particularly as around the sixteenth century it began to be thought of in territorial and possessive terms. Lanyer’s poem, inserted in her proto-feminist work Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, celebrates the existence and, at the same time, mourns the loss of a unique paradise – a feminocentric locus amoenus. The legal system of Patrilinear descent is overturned in the text by the creation of a separatist feminine community. Cookham metonymically represents not the political integrity or good stewardship of its owner, but the subjectivities of its female guests and chronicler. In manipulating features of Petrarchism, the pastoral and the country-house genre, Lanyer fashions herself as a nature poet by using material that traditionally had silenced women. |
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| Autores principais: | Guimarães, Paula Alexandra |
| Assunto: | Lanyer Poetry Renaissance Geography Gender Paradise Poesia Renascença Geografia Género Paraíso |
| Ano: | 2011 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | artigo |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso aberto |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade do Minho |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho |
| Resumo: | This article proposes to investigate an elegiac poem, “The Description of Cookham”, which Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645) wrote and published in 1610-11 at the request of her patron Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland – the first estate poem in English literary history and the first written by a woman. Property assumed a central role in the concepts of self and society, particularly as around the sixteenth century it began to be thought of in territorial and possessive terms. Lanyer’s poem, inserted in her proto-feminist work Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, celebrates the existence and, at the same time, mourns the loss of a unique paradise – a feminocentric locus amoenus. The legal system of Patrilinear descent is overturned in the text by the creation of a separatist feminine community. Cookham metonymically represents not the political integrity or good stewardship of its owner, but the subjectivities of its female guests and chronicler. In manipulating features of Petrarchism, the pastoral and the country-house genre, Lanyer fashions herself as a nature poet by using material that traditionally had silenced women. |
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