Early Modern Women Writers Engendering Descent

<p>Focusing on Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Sidney Wroth’s use of the figures of origin descent and inheritance in their poetry and prose this book examines how these central women writers situated themselves in terms of early modern England’s rich ancestral cultures employing these and other genealogical concepts to talk about authorship family selfhood and memory. In turn both Sidney Herbert and Sidney Wroth also shaped their works in relation to the ways in which writers within their familial communities and literary coteries constructed them as Sidneys heirs descendants and future ancestors in genres ranging from the patronage dedication and pastoral eclogue to mythographic <i>genealogia</i> and georgic poetry. </p><p>In the intersection of ancestry death sexuality and reproduction the book contends that Sidney Herbert and Sidney Wroth develop their authorship within the simultaneous rigidity and flexibility of their world’s genealogical discourses.</p>