The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739 1796 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780521374125)

In this original and challenging study, Donna Landry shows how an understanding of the remarkable but neglected careers of laboring-class women poets in the eighteenth century provokes a reassessment of our ideas concerning the literature of the period. Poets such as the washerwoman Mary Collier, the milkwoman Ann Yearsley, the domestic servants Mary Leapor and Elizabeth Hands, the dairywoman Jane Little, and the slave Phillis Wheatley can be seen employing various methods to adapt the conventions of polite verse for the purposes of social criticism. Historically important, technically impressive, and aesthetically innovative, the poetic achievements of these working class- women writers constitute an exciting literary discovery.

Author: Donna Landry
ISBN-10: 052137412X
ISBN-13: 9780521374125
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 10/26/1990
Pages: 336
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.62lbs
Size: 9.61h x 6.69w x 0.75d