In early modern lyric poetry, the male poet or lover often appears not as powerful and masterly but rather as broken, abject, and feminine. Catherine Bates examines the cultural and literary strategies behind this representation and uncovers radically alternative models of masculinity in the lyric tradition of the Renaissance. Focusing on Sidney, Ralegh, Shakespeare, and Donne, she offers astute readings of a wide range of texts a sonnet sequence, a blazon, an elegy, a complaint, and an epistle. She shows how existing critical approaches have too much invested in the figure of the...
In early modern lyric poetry, the male poet or lover often appears not as powerful and masterly but rather as broken, abject, and feminine. Catherine ...
As an age-old metaphor for the sexual chase, the hunt provides a uniquely conflicted site for the representation of masculinity. On the one hand, hunting had from ancient times served to define a particular and culturally-approved mode of masculinity as heroic, pursuant, and goal-oriented, where success was measured by the achievement of the objectives set: the capture and killing of prey. When applied to love, on the other hand, hunting was inflected quite differently. At first glance, the basic scenario of a male subject pursuing elusive quarry over which he ultimately comes to assert...
As an age-old metaphor for the sexual chase, the hunt provides a uniquely conflicted site for the representation of masculinity. On the one hand, hunt...
