Early work on literary authorship stressed the concept’s associations with men and masculinity?and, hence, its difficulties for women. Recent scholars have nuanced such claims, focusing not only on early modern women’s widespread involvement in literary culture, but also on the slippages and tensions that arise in Renaissance discussions of authorship and gender. What happens to our understanding of the early modern literary field when we consider the gendering of authorship as shifting and contested’
This panel, sponsored by the Rutgers Medieval-Renaissance Colloquium, welcomes papers that investigate the roles that gender plays in early modern theories, practices, and representations of authorship. How are the gendered aspects of such theories depicted, and how are they unsettled, reaffirmed, and reshaped in literary discourses’ What changes did Renaissance writers make to the models of authorship that they inherited from the ancient and medieval worlds, and how did gender factor into these adaptations and appropriations’ To what uses were various figures of gendered authorship, or of the female author in particular, put in the Renaissance? How might we conceptualize cross-gendered writing (men writing as women, or vice versa) beyond the usual metaphor of « ventriloquism’ »
Please submit a 150 word abstract and a one-page C.V. to Brian Pietras (bpietras@eden.rutgers.edu) by June 1st.