Of Poets and Things: Gender, Property, and Identity in Early Modern English Verse

FAIN: FT-51046-03

Pamela Susanne Hammons
University of Central Florida Board of Trustees (Orlando, FL 32816-8005)

Early modern English poets wrote many lyrics about common possessions, such as jewelry and ribbons, favorite pets and beverages, and houses great and small. Because the lyric typically foregrounds the first-person perspective, emotions, and thoughts of its speaker, the genre is a rich site for examining how early modern poets imagined influences between people and possessions. By examining lyrical representations of property by women and men, in manuscript and print, and by contextualizing them in relation to other kinds of writing, such as conduct books, religious treatises, laws, wills, plays, and epics, my book will make a new, unique contribution to the investigation of early modern identity in relation to everyday objects.

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