The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England

As a literary mode "lyric" is difficult to define precisely. While the term has conventionally been applied to brief, songlike poems expressing the speaker's interior thoughts critics have questioned many of the assumptions underlying this definition, calling into doubt the very possibility of self-expression in language. Whereas much recent scholarship on lyric has centered on the Romantic era, Heather Dubrow turns instead to the poetry of early modern England. The Challenges of Orpheus confronts widespread assumptions about lyric, exploring such topics as its relationship to its audiences, the impact of material conditions of production and other cultural pressures, lyric's negotiations of gender, and the interactions and tensions between lyric and narrative. Offering fresh perspectives on major texts of the period-from Wyatt's "My lute awake" to Milton's Nativity Ode-as well as poems by lesser-known figures, Dubrow extends her critical conclusions to poetry in other historical periods and to the relationship between creative writers and critics, recommending new directions for the study of lyric and of genre.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Rhetoric of Lyric: Definitions, Descriptions, Disputations 2. The Domain of Echo: Lyric Audiences 3. The Craft of Pygmalion: Immediacy and Distancing 4. The Predilections of Proteus: Size and Structure 5. The Myth of Janus: Lyric and/or Narrative 6. The Rhetorics of Lyric: Conclusions and New Perspectives Notes Index

About the Author :
Heather Dubrow is the John D. Boyd, S.J., Chair in the Poetic Imagination at Fordham University.

Review :
Thorough, penetrating, and on the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship. Essential. Choice A useful and detailed study. Dubrow is especially good at analysing the relationship between gender and genre. Times Literary Supplement Her refinement of generic oppositions... leads to some striking juxtapositions as well as-to my thinking at least-an exceptionally interesting discussion of the status and function of song in Shakespearean drama. Huntington Library Quarterly Dubrow accomplishes much in this pioneering study. Studies in English Literature Formidable exegetical skills... Dubrow's terse accounts bring great insight and illumination to the problem of defining and describing lyric poetry. Clio Includes some of her most important thinking to date about issues that are central to the study of lyric poetry in any period. Seventeenth Century News A study that is itself both challenging and gentle-in all the very best senses of that word. -- Christopher Martin Sixteenth Century Journal Her study exemplifies an ideal of informed and judicious close reading that one can only hope will prove as infectious as its author wishes it to be. -- Elizabeth Heale Modern Language Review Represents both a wide-ranging exploration of lyric poetry in the early modern period and a plea for scholars to emphasize multivalent ideas and inclusive taxonomies over hierarchical and sharply argumentative approaches. Year's Work in English Studies