Katherine Phillips: Form, Reception, and Literary Contexts

Katherine Philips (1632–1664) is widely regarded as a pioneering figure within English-language women’s literary history. Best known as a poet, she was also a skilled translator, letter writer and literary critic whose subjects ranged from friendship and retirement to politics and public life. Her poetry achieved a high reputation among coterie networks in London, Wales and Ireland during her lifetime, and was published to great acclaim after her death. The present volume, drawing on important recent research into her early manuscripts and printed texts, represents a new and innovative phase in Philips's scholarship. Emphasizing her literary responses to other writers as well as the ambition and sophistication of her work, it includes groundbreaking studies of her use of form and genre, her practices as a translator, her engagement with philosophy and political theory, and her experiences in Restoration Dublin. It also examines the posthumous reception of Philips’s poetry and model theoretical and digital humanities approaches to her work.

This book was originally published as two special issues of Women’s Writing.

Marie-Louise Coolahan is Professor of English at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. She is the author of Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (2010), and is currently the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project, RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550–1700.

Gillian Wright is Reader in English and Irish Literature at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is the author of Producing Women’s Poetry, 1600–1730: Text and Paratext, Manuscript and Print (2013), and she is currently editing a collection of Aphra Behn’s poetry for Cambridge University Press.