You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook is an invaluable collection of accounts of women and femininity in early modern England. The volume is divided thematically into nine sections, each with an accessible introduction, notes on sources and an annotated bibliography. The sections are: * Theology * Biology * Conduct * Sexuality and Motherhood * Politics and Law * Education * Work * Writing and Speaking * Feminism Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook brings together sources ranging from medical documents and political pamphlets to sermons and the Bible, as well as literary sources. Providing a historical context to issues of gender in the Renasissance, it will be essential reading for students of the period, gender studies and cultural history.
What makes Shakespeare's late plays so special? Through detailed analyses of key passages, Kate Aughterson shows how these plays portray a world of political intrigue, familial chaos and crisis, which teeters continually into tragedy: a world we can recognise today. Part I of this engaging study: - Provides stimulating close readings of extracts from The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and Pericles - Examines major topics such as openings, endings, familial roles, stage properties, spectacle and song - Offers suggestions for further work and summarizes the methods of analysis Part II supplies essential background material, including: - Detailed accounts of Shakespeare's literary and historical contexts - Samples from important critical works and performances With a helpful Further Reading section, this illuminating volume is ideal for anyone who wishes to appreciate and explore Shakespeare's late plays for themselves.
This comprehensive anthology collects together primary texts and documents relevant to the literature, culture, and intellectual life in England between 1550 and 1660.
Kate Aughterson provides readers with an approachable and fascinating critical guide to the dramatic works of an important seventeenth-century woman writer. Aughterson analyses Aphra Behn's abilities as a playwright, showing particularly how she skillfully employs comic and dramatic conventions to radical ends, and how she forces her audience to engage with issues about gender and sexuality whilst retaining her witty and accessible style. Chapters in the first part of the book provide close readings of the comedies, addressing such topics as openings, endings, character types, staging, and politics and society. In the second part, Aughterson not only examines Behn's literary career and the Restoration contexts of her plays, but also looks at some sample criticism and explores Behn's drama as performance.
An invaluable collection of primary sources on women and femininity in early modern England, including medical documents, political pamphlets, sermons and literary sources. Sources are accompanied by a clear introduction and notes.
Shakespeare and Gender guides students, educators, practitioners and researchers through the complexities of the representation of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare's work. Informed by contemporary and early modern debates and insights into gender and sexuality, including intersectionality, feminist geography, queer and performance studies and fourth-wave feminism, this book provides a lucid and lively discussion of how gender and sexual identity are debated, contested and displayed in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. Using close textual analysis hand-in- hand with diverse contextual materials, the book offers an accessible and intelligent introduction to how gender debates are integral to the plays and poems, and why we continue to read and perform them with this in mind. Topics and themes discussed include gendering madness, paternity and the patriarchy, sexuality, anxious masculinity, maternal bodies, gender transgression, and kingship and the male body politic.
This book explores the history of women’s engagement with writing experimentally. Women writers have long used different narratives and modes of writing as a way of critiquing worlds and stories that they find themselves at odds with, but at the same time, as a way to participate in such spaces. Experimentation—of style, mode, voice, genre and language—has enabled women writers to be simultaneously creative and critical, engaged in and yet apart from stories and cultures that have so often seen them as ‘other’. This collection shows that women writers in English over the past 400 years have challenged those ideas not only through explicit polemic and alternative representations but through disrupting the very modes of representation and story itself.
These essays discuss issues of Renaissance textuality. They explore such topics as the impact of editorial strategies and modes of presentation on our understanding of the text; and the relevance of gender to textual retrieval and preservation.
This exciting collection of original essays on early modern women’s writing offers a range of approaches to a growing field. As a whole, the volume introduces readers to a number of writers, such as Mirabai and Liu Rushi, who are virtually invisible in Anglophone scholarship, and to writers who remain little known, such as Elizabeth Melville, Elizabeth Hatton, and Jane Sharpe. The volume also represents critical strategies designed to open up the emergent canon of early modern women’s writing to new approaches, especially those that have consolidated the integration of literary and intellectual history, with an emphasis on religion, legal issues, and questions of genre. The authors expand the methodological possibilities available to approach early modern women who wrote in a diverse number of genres, from letters to poetry, autobiography and prose fiction. The sixteen essays are a major contribution to an area that has attracted the interest of a number of fields, including literary studies, history, cultural studies, and women’s studies.