Recreating the Canon: Women Writers and Anthologies of Early Modern Verse.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s feminist scholars reviewed the way in which writing produced by early modern Englishwomen was being studied. They demanded more accurate and thorough historical research into both women's lives and their texts, and also a better understanding of women's use of genre. Recent anthologies of poetry demonstrate that while much extensive and valuable historical research has since taken place, the formal aspects of women's texts have been widely overlooked. In contrast, historicist interest in texts by men has been accompanied by a continued emphasis on literary style. These divergent critical approaches make it difficult to reconcile the two currently separate canons of literature by women and that by men, preventing a better appreciation of the early modern canon as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]