A Happier Eden - by Heather Dubrow (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A Happier Eden maps the largely unexplored terrain of the Stuart epithalamium, or wedding poem, focusing in particular on the complex attitudes toward marriage it reflects. Heather Dubrow examines responses to marriage, sexuality, and gender in the works of such seventeenth-century poets as Donne, Jonson, and Herrick, and traces the interplay between generic conventions and the dynamics of marriage. Shedding light on the tensions associated with wedlock in Stuart England, she also considers how they are variously repressed or resolved over a wide range of epithalamia.

Dubrow's analysis of Stuart marriage departs from earlier accounts in emphasizing the coexistence of competing and conflicting ideologies. Rather than assuming, for example, that Protestant England privileged marriage over celibacy, she demonstrates that an older respect of both celibacy and virginity survived in many reaches of Stuart society. She also charts the interaction between generic traditions and cultural influences. The nature of marriage in Stuart England, she shows, influenced not only which generic norms poets emphasized but also how those norms were interpreted by contemporary readers.

Although concerned specifically with lyric and narrative poetry that celebrates weddings, A Happier Eden also traces parallels between that tradition and other types of drama and poetry. Comparing the epithalamia of Herrick and Jonson, she seeks to redefine the critical relationship between the two. Of special interest is an appendix containing Jackson Bryce's annotated translation-the first in English-of Julius Caesar Scaliger's sixteenth-century essay on the epithalamium (Book III, chapter 101 of his Poetics).

Review Quotes

Heather Dubrow combines new historicist concerns with power and patronage, feminist interest in gender, and formalist analysis of lyric poetry as she explores connections between generic conventions and cultural attitudes in the Stuart epithalamium A Happier Eden is an excellent book which deserves to have considerable influence on Renaissance studies.

This book opens out spaciously from what seems at first a rather narrow subject matter; I hope that readers who think they are not interested in epithalamia will not be deterred. I hope, too, that the book's quiet but firm advocacy of tolerance and pluralism in our discipline will be heard Those who are sisters in a community of scholars and those who still want to conduct literary criticism with truncheons and broadswords will all find something to interest them in this splendidly magisterial book.

About the Author

Heather Dubrow is Professor of English and the John D. Boyd, SJ Chair in Poetic Imagination at Fordham University. She is the author of Echoes of Desire, Deixis in the Early Modern English Lyric, and The Challenges of Orpheus, among other books.