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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the first book to provide students and scholars with a truly comprehensive guide to the early modern soliloquy.
Gives accurate and reliable summaries of the current state of research. It includes entries on philosophers, problems, terms, historical periods, subjects and the cultural context of Renaissance Philosophy. Furthermore, it covers Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Byzantine and vernacular philosophy, and includes entries on the cross-fertilization of these philosophical traditions. A unique feature of this encyclopedia is that it does not aim to define what Renaissance philosophy is, rather simply to cover the philosophy of the period between 1300 and 1650.
Though much has been written about connections between early modern utopia and nascent European imperialism, Nina Chordas brings a fresh perspective to the topic by exploring it through some of the sub-genres that comprise early modern utopia, identifying and discussing each specific form in the cultural and historical contexts that render it suitable for the creation and promulgation of utopian programs, whether imaginary or intended for actual implementation. This study transforms scholarly understanding of early modern utopia by first complicating our notion of it as a single genre, and secondly by fusing our paradoxically fragmented view of it as alternately a literary or social phenomen...