Poetry and Gender: Critical Approaches

Over the past three decades, a substantial body of literary criticism has emerged that has insistently addressed questions of the relations between gender and genre and how women poets engage with and inscribe themselves within poetic traditions. These studies have posed questions about the relations between genre and gender and the poetic positions available to historical women as writing and reading subjects. Taking poetry produced by women into account when mapping literary history introduces different angles, revealing gaps in how the historical unfolding of genres in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been understood. More recently, methodologies coalescing in the practice of a feminist formalism have provided a more concentrated reading of women’s formal engagement with prosody and early modern poetics as a means of generating historical questions and interrogating canonicity.