ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the works of several women poets who similarly insert their revisions simultaneously into the social and literary realms. It also examines how seventeenth-century women's composition of lyrics intersects significantly with the social experiences of those women. The book concerns itself primarily with what those women do when they get that harp in their hands--when they exert poetic resistance by employing various lyric traditions to change or to reconceive damaging, restrictive conventions that shape their social lives. It explores how Anna Trapnel's adaptation of the tradition of metrical paraphrases of and verse meditations on scripture. It also explores Anna Trapnel's importation of that tradition into the battleground of dispute over the politico-theological issues of the revolutionary period constitute a fascinating intervention of literary convention in the social realm.
