Laura

“[A] fascinating tour of complex and compelling texts from an ‘anamorphic’ perspective where the male protagonists’ gender and the Petrarchan poem’s genre come to seem something other.” - Comparative Literature Studies

“[T]he intellectual joy and energy with which Estrin leaps into her subject opens this text to its reader. It is a complex book, deeply infused with a sense of purpose: nothing less than the re-visioning . . . of the Petrarchan tradition. As such, it is an important, perhaps essential, piece of scholarship in the current reassessment of Renaissance Petrarchism.” - Early Modern Literary Studies

“Estrin often demonstrates beautifully how lyric subjectivity grapples with questions of gender. . . . Laura contributes vividly to the current project of examining our assumptions about the representations of women in lyric poetry; for this reason, and for its generous, intelligent readings of poems, the book will prove valuable to scholars of gender studies, genre studies, and English and continental early modern poetry.” - Renaissance Quarterly

“In its most original achievement . . . Estrin’s book preempts feminist narratives about the construction of the woman by the male poet, suggesting instead how the male poet is constructed by the woman who is ‘always already’ part of his identity. . . . This is an argument whose import lies deeply in the realm of the imaginary and really concerns the poet’s ‘muse.’ ” - Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

“This bold and provocative study presents a systematic and wholesale revaluation of Petrarch’s love poetry and of the movement called Petrarchism, especially with reference to selected lyric poems in 16th- and 17th-century England. . . . Rarely has the alignment between postmodern theory and textual analysis been so well enacted. . . Very highly recommended.”
- , Choice

"Barbara Estrin’s Laura challenges the feminist contention that in early modern English love poetry by male authors the beloved female is constructed as simply a silent, passive object-figure. She postulates that even in the conventional love-situation, although the male makes the sexual advance, it is the female’s response which decides the course and genre of the story: either rejecting it (Laura as Daphne); or willingly accepting it (Laura as Eve); or else reinventing the whole situation, and the power-gender status of both participants (Laura as Mercury). Estrin revisits some of Petrarch’s Rime sparse to demonstrate that the Petrarchan tradition was always more open to this variety of possibilities than it has usually been taken to be, and then provides a series of close readings of works by Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell." - , Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association

"Laura is an extraordinarily sustained, compelling, and critically resourceful reading of the lyric Petrarch and three of his major English successors. This book counts as a major revision of the critical discourse of ‘Petrarchanism.’ Estrin not only produces this critique, however; she clinches it with readings so concentrated, well-founded, and fully argued that her successors will have to meet a new standard of proof." - Jonathan Crewe, Dartmouth College

"Estrin’s readings are intricate and persuasive, and revealing. Her writing, at once deeply poetic and nuanced, is extremely clear. She argues for a kind of fluidity of the poetic subject that allows for gender crossings and transgressions; the resulting exploration of male subjectivity and feminine representations is immensely suggestive and potentially provocative." - Elizabeth D. Harvey, University of Western Ontario