caa a22 4500 386309957 CHVBK 20180307111542.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198810 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0361233300006670 doi S0361233300006670 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0361233300006670 Caldwell Patricia Why Our First Poet Was a Woman: Bradstreet and the Birth of an American Poetic Voice [Elektronische Daten] [Patricia Caldwell] Anne Bradstreet has come a long way since John Harvard Ellis hailed her over a century ago as "the earliest poet of her sex in America.” Today, more justly, we view Bradstreet simply as "the first authentic poetic artist in America's history” and even as "the founder of American literature.” At the same time, a more sensitive criticism is looking anew at Bradstreet's personal drama as a woman in the first years of the New England settlement: her life as a wife, as mother of eight children, as a frontier bluestocking (though still, in many critics' eyes, "restless in Puritan bonds”), and even as a feminist in the wilderness. Feminist critics in particular have revitalized our understanding of Bradstreet and her work by probing her subtle "subversion” of patriarchal traditions, both theological and poetical, and by placing her among contemporary 17th-Century women writers, making her no longer a phenomenon on the order of Doctor Johnson's dancing dog, but finally a participating voice in her age. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988 Prospects Cambridge University Press 13(1988-10), 1-35 0361-2333 13<1 1988 13 PTS https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300006670 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300006670 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Caldwell Patricia NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Prospects Cambridge University Press 13(1988-10), 1-35 0361-2333 13<1 1988 13 PTS CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge