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English Advance Access published online on October 4, 2009
English, doi:10.1093/english/efp033
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

LUCY HUTCHINSON AND GENESIS: PARAPHRASE, EPIC, ROMANCE

Robert Wilcher*

Early Modern Studies, University of Birmingham


  Abstract

This article examines how a self-consciously puritan author draws upon various generic resources in a verse rendering of the first thirty-two chapters of Genesis. It distinguishes between Lucy Hutchinson's strict adherence to the biblical narrative of the Creation and Fall in the five cantos that were published as Order and Disorder in 1679 and the greater imaginative freedom she permitted herself in the further fifteen cantos that remained in manuscript. While established methods of scriptural paraphrase and meditation, elevated here and there by epic conventions, are employed throughout the text, features of fictional romance – of a kind deliberately eschewed in the 1679 volume – become prominent in the narrative expansion of later episodes involving the experiences of such female characters as Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel.

* Correspondence to Robert Wilcher, former Reader in Early Modern Studies in the English Department at the University of Birmingham


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