Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne and Marvell (Post-Contemporary Interventions) [Hardcover]

Barbara L. Estrin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 20, 1994 | Series: Post-Contemporary Interventions

How do men imagine women? In the poetry of Petrarch and his English successors—Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell—the male poet persistently imagines pursuing a woman, Laura, whom he pursues even as she continues to deny his affections. Critics have long held that, in objectifying Laura, these male-authored texts deny the imaginative, intellectual, and physical life of the woman they idealize. In Laura, Barbara L. Estrin counters this traditional view by focusing not on the generative powers of the male poet, but on the subjectivity of the imagined woman and the imaginative space of the poems she occupies.
Through close readings of the Rime sparse and the works of Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell, Estrin uncovers three Lauras: Laura-Daphne, who denies sexuality; Laura-Eve, who returns the poet’s love; and Laura-Mercury, who reinvents her own life. Estrin claims that in these three guises Laura subverts both genre and gender, thereby introducing multiple desires into the many layers of the poems. Drawing upon genre and gender theories advanced by Jean-François Lyotard and Judith Butler to situate female desire in the poem’s framework, Estrin shows how genre and gender in the Petrarchan tradition work together to undermine the stability of these very concepts.
Estrin’s Laura constitutes a fundamental reconceptualization of the Petrarchan tradition and contributes greatly to the postmodern reassessment of the Renaissance period. In its descriptions of how early modern poets formulate questions about sexuality, society and poetry, Laura will appeal to scholars of the English and Italian Renaissance, of gender studies, and of literary criticism and theory generally.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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

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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (December 20, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822315009
• ISBN-13: 978-0822315001
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,145,118 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2.0 out of 5 stars Where is Laura to be found?, November 6, 2008

By 

T. Hall (Ohio) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne and Marvell (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Hardcover)

First, Donne is only Petrarchan in some ironic, oblique sense. Laura, or any woman resembling Laura, is not to be found in his Songs and Sonnets or his Elegies, not to mention his Divine Poems and Sermons. In fact, the women in Donne's poems are many and varied, and given varied treatments by the poet, some 'objectifying', some not so much. It's clear that Donne learned from Petrarch, of course, but he has done his own 'deconstruction' of it, and turned in the direction of the earth instead of Petrarch's Ovidian allusions and Neoplatonic ascent.

Second, where is Laura in Marvell? Is there some echo of her in his coy mistress? Would she find a place in the garden of the happily solitary poet? Perhaps there's a gender-bending allusion to her in his ode and other poems to Cromwell, but that's a bit of a stretch. In fact, I don't find in Marvell the delight in and antipathy toward all kinds of women that I find in Donne - make of that what you will.

So, that leaves, thirdly, Wyatt, the most immediate successor in English to the Petrarchan tradition. I'm not certain that the lover(s) in his poems are Lauralike, but his tropes are certainly similar to Petrarch's. Indeed, in Wyatt we find the lover in endless pursuit, frustrated by a beloved at once aloof and cruel. Yes, Wyatt is the poet in Estrin's trio hewing most to line she wishes to trace and tangle.

Believe it or not, there is a point to all this. I find Estrin's book flawed from the beginning because two of the three poets she studies refuse the Petrarchan mold she tries to impose upon 'em. She would have done better to examine Sidney, or Spenser (who himself undoes the Petrarchan tropes by having his sonnet sequence lead to marriage and erotic union with a real live flesh and blood woman, one who is particular and difficult as humans usually are).

This is all the more surprising because Estrin has obviously spent much time with the works of her three English poets. Puzzling, just puzzling - still, it's a bad book because for all her attention, Donne and Marvell especially elude her.