Anne Bradstreet's family plots: puritanism, humanism, posthumanism
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 30879290
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.13110/criticism.62.1.0029
- Title of journal
- Criticism
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 29
- Volume
- 62
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 0011-1589
- Open access status
- Exception within 3 months of publication
- Month of publication
- January
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This 16,000-word article proposes a critical intervention into the field of early modern studies, particularly women’s writing. It brings into critical conversation the neglected manuscript writings of Anne Bradstreet, and introduces into the field the benefits of posthumanist theory in approaching Bradstreet’s Puritanism and humanism, with implications for this theoretical approach to early modern writing more broadly. Through a close reading of Bradstreet’s poem, ‘Contemplations’, her unpublished manuscript (Harvard AM 1007.1) and extant funeral monuments in Massachusetts, this interdisciplinary study blends archival research, fieldwork, and theoretical expertise to argue that Bradstreet’s works display her entanglement with the natural world; her willingness to recognise and engage with the nonhuman; and her profound sense of her embodied, gendered subjectivity. These are attitudes which align with posthumanist ideas of the body and world. Avoiding anachronism or presentism, the article exemplifies an approach to early modern works which at once attends to the subtleties of their viewpoints and their grounding in the cultural currents of their period, unobscured by twenty-first century agendas, while seeking alignments between the early modern and postmodern understandings of the subject. Bradstreet’s unpublished manuscript is comprised of a text-based emblem book (‘Meditations’) and a ‘mother’s legacy’ in the form of a spiritual biography, plus additional poems not published until the nineteenth century. The work has not been studied critically despite a substantial body of scholarship devoted to Bradstreet. The addition of this manuscript work into Bradstreet’s corpus contributes new material by the author into the field, promising to bridge a critical divide between biographical interpretations of Bradstreet’s works and more recent criticism which views her corpus in primarily political terms.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -