The brief Ovidian career of Isabella Whitney: From Heroidean to Tristian complaint
Date
2020Author
Reid, Lindsay Ann
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Reid, Lindsay Ann. (2020). The Brief Ovidian Career of Isabella Whitney: From Heroidean to Tristian Complaint. In Sarah C.E. Ross & Rosalind Smith (Eds.), Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form and Politics: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Abstract
Calling attention to the Ovidian contours of Isabella Whitney s cursus litterarum, this essay reconsiders the literary heritage of the personae she adopts in The Copy of a Letter (c. 1566) and A Sweet Nosgay (1573). Existing analyses of Whitney s Ovidianism have tended to emphasize her debts to the female-voiced epistles of the Heroides while simultaneously overlooking profound intertextual connections between A Sweet Nosgay and Ovid s exilic writings. In contrast, this essay argues that the outlines of a self-consciously classical career trajectory (its stages demarcated by Whitney s subtle aesthetic shift from Heroidean amatory complaint to Tristian exile complaint) can be detected when The Copy of a Letter and A Sweet Nosgay are read contiguously.