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This book contains expansive, multifaceted narrative of British women's literary and textual production from the Reformation to the Restoration.
The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) is the first original play by a woman to be published in England, and its author is the first English woman writer to be memorialized in a biography, which is included with this edition of the play. Mariam is a distinctive example of Renaissance drama that serves the desire of today's readers and scholars to know not merely how women were represented in the early modern period but also how they themselves perceived their own condition. With this textually emended and fully annotated edition, the play will now be accessible to all readers. The accompanying biography of Cary further enriches our knowledge of both domestic and religious conflicts in the seventeenth century.
Troping the Body: Gender, Etiquette, and Performance is an interdisciplinary study of etiquette texts, conduct literature, and advice books and films. GwendolynAudrey Foster analyzes the work of such women authors as Emily Post, Christine de Pizan, Hannah Webster Foster, Emily Brontë, Frances E. W. Harper, and Martha Stewart as well as such women filmmakers as Lois Weber and Kasi Lemmons. "Specifically," Foster notes, "I was interested in the possibility of locating power and agency in the voices of popular etiquette writers." Her investigation led her to analyze etiquette and conduct literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Within this wide scope, she redefines the boundaries of con...
THE text of A Pastorall is a romantic masque written by Jane and Elizabeth Cavendish, the young daughters of William Cavendish and step-daughters of Margaret Cavendish. A Pastorall has remained unprinted but is preserved in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University under MS. Osborn b.233, which bears the following title: "Poems, songs, and a pastorall, by the Rt honble the Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley." Though the play was listed in the works written by these two early English women playwrights, students of the drama have displayed very little curiosity regarding it, favoring the dramatic work Concealed Fancies. For those intersted in Seventeenth Century women's writing, this work contributes to the understanding of the Cavendish Circle.
Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama is the most complete sourcebook for the study of this growing area of inquiry. It brings together, for the first time, a collection of the key critical commentaries and historical essays - both classic and contemporary - on Renaissance women's drama. Specifically designed to provide a comprehensive overview for students, teachers and scholars, this collection combines: * this century's key critical essays on drama by early modern women by early critics such as Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot * specially-commissioned new essays by some of today's important feminist critics * a preface and introduction explaining this selection and contexts of the materials * a bibliography of secondary sources Playwrights covered include Joanna Lumley, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth and the Cavendish sisters.
Oppositional Voices is a study of six women writers in the late Elizabethan period, who, ignoring Renaissance society's injunction that women should confine themselves to religious compositions, wrote and translated poetry, drama and romantic fiction. Tina Krontiris brings together their work, including at times their voiced opposition to certain oppressive ideas and stereotypes. Rather than simply glorify these voices, her study subtly probes the influence of a culture inimical to female creative activity on the writings of these women.
"This collection speaks to common themes and strategies in women's writing about their different worlds, from Margaret Cavendish's seventeenth-century Blazing World of the North Pole to the "men-less" islands of the French writer Scudery to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utopias of Shelley and Gaskell, and science fiction pulps, finishing with the more contemporary feminist fictions of Le Guin, Wittig, Piercy, and Mitchison. It shows that these fictions historically speak to each other and together amount to a literary tradition of women's writing about a better place."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
A fascinating case study of the complex psychic relationship between religion and madness in early seventeenth-century England, the narrative presented here is a rare, detailed autobiographical account of one woman's experience of mental disorder. The writer, Dionys Fitzherbert, recounts the course of her affliction and recovery and describes various delusions and confusions, concerned with (among other things) her family and her place within it; her relation to religion; and the status of the body, death and immortality. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England presents in modern typography an annotated edition of the author's manuscript of this unusual and compelling text. Also inclu...
Women have traditionally been expected to tend the sick as part of their domestic duties; yet throughout history they have faced an uphill struggle to be accepted as healers outside the household. In this provocative anthology, twelve essays by historians and literary scholars explore the work of women as healers and physicians. The essays range across centuries, nations, and cultures to focus on the ideological and practical obstacles women have faced in the world of medicine. Each examines the situation of women healers in a particular time and place through cases that are emblematic of larger issues and controversies in that period. The stories presented here are typical of different but ...
This book examines writing both by and about Renaissance women rulers. It offers detailed analyses of poems, letters, and other writings by both Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, and situates these firmly within the context of other literary figurings of Renaissance queens and queenship. It looks at a range of texts, ranging from the polemical (and largely ephemeral) treatises on the questions of female rule which were prompted by the sudden explosion of women rulers, to works by Shakespeare, Milton, and Elizabeth Cary, as well as the anonymous Arden of Faversham. The book as a whole thus explores both how Renaissance queens wrote themselves and how they were written by others.