PhD completion Seminar

You are warmly welcomed to join Julie Robarts at her PhD completion seminar:

CHALLENGING MALE AUTHORED POETRY: MARGHERITA COSTA'S MARINIST LYRICS (1638-39)

Margherita Costa (c. 1600 - c. 1664) authored the largest published corpus of single-author texts by any woman in 17th century Europe, between 1630 and 1654, including prose, poetry and theatre. She was also a virtuosa singer, performing opera and chamber music in Rome, where she was born, and in Florence, Paris, Savoy, Venice, and possibly Brunswick. The elite of these courts were her dedicatees and literary patrons. This is the first study of Costa's first four books of poetry and love letters, an enormous production of more than 1000 pages, clandestinely published in 1638 and 1639 through the support of a Roman and Florentine libertine network. Through close readings and intertextual analysis, I shed light on the rhetorical and ideological implications of female authorship of sensual, comic and grotesque poetry and epistolary prose. The most striking stylistic feature of Costa's lyric corpus, and the central focus of my study, is her production of hundreds of female and male poetic voices in her poetry and love letters, including a female libertine subject, the Bella donna. Costa's writing stretched the boundaries of female authorship, literary form, and gender representation in the Italian literary baroque.

Date: Monday September 17
Time: 2.00pm
Location: Level 5, Room 506, Babel Building (Building 139)