The Work of Form

Elizabeth Scott-Baumann is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King's College London. She is the author of Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture 1640-1680 (OUP) and co-edited The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women (Palgrave, 2010) with Johanna Harris. She is also editing an anthology of Women Poets of the English Civil War for Manchester University Press with Sarah C. E. Ross.Ben Burton teaches at Nottingham High School and was previously Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at St Catherine's College, Oxford University. He has published articles on early modern devotional poetry, including an essay which won Renaissance and Reformation's Natalie Zemon Davis prize in 2007.

• Foreword ; 1. The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture ; 2. 'You may be wondering why I called you all here today': Patterns of Gathering in the Early Modern Print Lyric ; 3. Allusions and Distinctions: Pentameter Couplets in Ben Jonson's Epigrams and Forest ; 4. Forms of Worship: Shakespeare's Sonnets, Ritual, and the Genealogy of formalism ; 5. Bondage and the Lyric: Philosophical and Formal, especially Renaissance ; 6. Thinking in Stanzas: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece ; 7. A Poetics of Song ; 8. On the Reuse of Poetic Form: The Ghost in the Shell ; 9. Gender, Reception, and Form: Early Modern Women and the Making of Verse ; 10. 'I haue not time to point yr booke ... which I desire you yourselfe to doe': Editing the Form of Women's Manuscript Verse ; 11. Poetry on the Page: Visual Signalling and the Mind's Ear ; The Work of Form: Some Afterwords

[T]his rich collection of essays ... contributes to a neo-formalism that counters the dominant literary historicism.