Women and the Poetics of Dissent in the English Revolution

Women and the Poetics of Dissent in the English Revolution examines the aesthetic dimensions of female sectarian culture during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. The topics covered here range from explorations of the formal aspects of women's street performance, petitioning, and political writings, to their fraught relationship with the devotional and metaphysical traditions. In a period that witnessed the transition from subject to citizen, Romack sets the aesthetic strategies deployed by women like Mary Dyer, Elizabeth Poole, and Mary Carey against the artistry of their male contemporaries-from John Milton and Andrew Marvell to John Bunyan. Romack's analysis not only forces contemporary scholars to re-think our own aesthetic designations and sensibilities, she pressures our central assumptions about what it means to possess political agency.