Pretty creatures? Women and poetry in the early modern world

Professor Sarah Ross reflects on a career recuperating the poetry of early modern women.

What does early modern English poetry tell us about women? Where the poetry of Shakespeare and his male contemporaries gives us women as objects of desire or tragic collateral, early modern women writers and their large poetic corpus offer us complex performances of gendered interiority, social and political acuity, and aesthetic range and brilliance. In this inaugural lecture, Professor Sarah Ross reflects on a career recuperating the poetry of early modern women and explores the implications of expanding the canon in global contexts and in Aotearoa New Zealand.

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