ABSTRACT
The emergence of the publishing female poet in English is strongly associated with the generic conventions and pedagogical scenarios of the dream-vision, particularly the dream prologue as strategic textual opening. Associated with intertextuality, allegorized autobiography and an elegiac relation to knowledge, dream-vision offers a venue for the public self-examination and diagnosis of the ailments and compulsions of the bookish woman as she struggles to negotiate the links between psyche and soma, reading and writing. The defensive rhetoric of Whitney’s book performs a double service, mitigating the offence of the writing woman through the figure of the good patient, and promising to cure the author and those women like her, who are her nominated readers, through conscientious study of masculine doctrine.
