Displaying the muse: Print, prologue, poetics, and early modern women writers published in England and Spain

This dissertation examines prefaces to print publications from the sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries in England, Spain, and their colonies. The rise of print technology during this time allowed texts to enter the growing literary market of a newly forming capitalist economy in great numbers. Women writers of upper and middle classes were able to enter this forbidden territory by means of various strategies. One of these strategies was the "gendered modesty topos," which consists of an apology for being a woman and daring to write. By comparing a selection of prefaces to prose and poetic texts, I examine the extent to which the use of this topos in the preface represents a resistance to the male-dominated literary arena of the time.;The first chapter provides an overview of prefaces to poetry by men writers. While individualized notions of authorship were increasingly deployed in the preface, I argue that the relationship of writer to reader was more complex than certain prefatory critics, such as A. Porqueras Mayo and Kevin Dunn, have charted it out to be. Furthermore, the privileging of individual authors, such as Ben Jonson and Lope de Vega, had devastating effects on the ability of women to appear in print, materially and rhetorically. The second and third chapters focus on the strategies Spanish and English women used from about 1550 to 1650 regarding their editorial display and self-display in the preface in relation to an implied readership. In their prefaces, Margaret Tyler, Isabella Whitney, and Beatriz Bernal relate to their readership in ways that register a varied gender presence in relation to an implied and gendered readership. The prefaces of Aemelia Lanyer and Maria de Zayas require that the reader acknowledge her or his participation in an imagined textual community, which in both cases is radically gendered female. The final chapter deals with how varied prefatory strategies are played out in relation to colonial endeavors in the Americas. Specifically, I deal with the prefatory display of Sor Juana and Anne Bradstreet, who were advertised by their respective European editors as the first women poets, or "tenth muses," of the Americas.