Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England
Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England
£32.00
GBPIn early modern England, boys and girls learned to be masculine or feminine as they learned to read and write. This 1999 book explores how gender differences, instilled through specific methods of instruction in literacy, were scrutinised in the English public theatre. Close readings of plays from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost to Thomas Dekker's Whore of Babylon, and of poems, didactic treatises and autobiographical writings from the same period, offer a richly textured analysis of the interaction between didactic precepts, literary models, and historical men and women. At the cross-roads between literary studies and social and cultural history, Eve Sanders' research offers insights into poems, plays, and first-person narratives (including works by women writers, such as Mary Sidney and Anne Clifford) and into the social conflicts that shaped individuals as the writers and readers of such texts.
- Important new contribution to growing area of literacy studies, history of education, history of reading, focusing particularly on gender
- Based on original research in early printed books and manuscripts
- Interdisciplinary combination of literary analysis, nuanced theoretical understanding of gender issues, and social/cultural history
Reviews & endorsements
'A masterpiece of clear exposition, elegant presentation, and beautiful writing. It is one of the few books I've read where the reader knows what is going on from the very first sentence, and is not disappointed afterwards. It takes all the best from current approaches to literary scholarship without any of its usual obfuscation. It is wonderfully erudite as well.' Philip Gavitt, St Louis University
'A sophisticated analysis of how girls and boys learned gender roles as they learned to read and write and how gender differences were supported or critiqued in the English public theater and in writings by women and men. The book is first-rate literary history and first-rate social and cultural history that confronts the connections between gender theory and historical practice. This is fine scholarship.' Awards Committee for The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women
Product details
March 2008Paperback
9780521056496
284 pages
228 × 152 × 17 mm
0.44kg
8 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- Preface
- 1. On his breast writ
- 2. Enter Hamlet reading on a book
- 3. She reads and smiles
- 4. Writes in his tables
- 5. She writes
- Bibliography.
