The Imprint of Gender

What did it mean to be published at the end of the sixteenth century? While in polite circles gentlemen exchanged handwritten letters, published authors risked association with the low-born masses. Examining a wide range of published material including sonnets, pageants, prefaces, narrative poems, and title pages, Wendy Wall considers how the idea of authorship was shaped by the complex social controversies generated by publication during the English Renaissance. In the process, she maps the intricate connections between authorship and the gendered rhetoric used to introduce the book as an item for sale.Wall looks at how the dynamics of courtly society in the Renaissance informed the emergence of authorship, and how publication reflected cultural anxiety over shifting social boundaries. When writers, publishers and printers adapted material for the press, she maintains, they promoted a particular concept of literary authority, one that masculinized the domain of authorship and the literary marketplace. Male writers, she argues, employed themes of cross-dressing, voyeurism, and courtly love to designate the feminine as the ground upon which authorship was established. Wall concludes by investigating the ways in which women writers of the Renaissance, in creating new models of authorship, confronted both the objectification of women in tropes used to establish authority and the general problems of publication.Challenging received interpretations of the advent of print culture, The Imprint of Gender will be compelling reading for students and scholars in the fields of Renaissance studies, feminist theory, cultural studies, literary theory, and the history of books.