World-Making Renaissance Women
World-Making Renaissance Women
This book answers three simple questions. First, what mistaken assumptions do we make about the early modern period when we ignore women's literary contributions? Second, how might we come to recognise women's influence on the history of literature and culture, as well as those instances of outright pathbreaking mastery for which they are so often responsible? Finally, is it possible to see some women writers as world-makers in their own right, individuals whose craft cut into cultural practice so incisively that their shaping authority can be traced well beyond their own moment? The essays in this volume pursue these questions through intense archival investigation, intricate close reading, and painstaking literary-historical tracking, tracing in concrete terms sixteen remarkable women and their world-shaping activities.
- Puts early modern women at the centre of the study of early modern literature and culture, tracing the startling range of world-shaping contributions they made during this period
- Discusses canonical and lesser-known women writers side-by-side, with analyses ranging from Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish to Mary Carey and Katherine Austen
- Offers an invaluable interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students not only of the Renaissance but also of poetry, drama, literary history, the history of philosophy, manuscript culture, feminisms, queer theories, geographical approaches and religion and literature
Reviews & endorsements
'This fine compilation of essays should prove of interest to scholars in numerous fields, especially literary scholars.' Heidi Olson Campbell, Renaissance and Reformation
Product details
November 2023Paperback
9781108926393
320 pages
227 × 151 × 17 mm
0.49kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- The literary contours of women's world-making Brandie R. Siegfried and Pamela S. Hammons
- Part I. Early Modern Women Framing the Modern World:
- 1. Erotic origins: genesis, the passion, and Aemilia Lanyer's Queer temporality Erin Murphy
- 2. Aphra Behn's fiction: transmission, editing, and canonization Paul Salzman
- 3. From aisling vision to Irish queen: the reimergence of Gráinne Nà Mháille in Europe's revolutionary period Brandie R. Siegfried
- 4. Reframing the picture: screening early modern women for modern audiences Lisa Walters and Naomi Miller
- Part II. Remaking the Literary World:
- 5. Uncloseted: geography and early modern women's dramatic writing Marion Wynne-Davies
- 6. Lucy Hutchinson's memoirs as auto-biography Laura DeFurio
- 7. Commonplace genres, or women's interventions in non-traditional literary forms: Madame de Sablé, Aphra Behn, and the maxim Victoria E. Burke
- 8. Form, formalism, and literary studies: the case of Margaret Cavendish Lara Dodds
- Part III. Connecting the Social Worlds of Religion, Politics, and Philosophy:
- 9. Royalism and resistance: the personal and the political in Anne, Lady Halkett's Meditations, 1660–1699 Suzanne Trill
- 10. Hester Pulter's dissolving worlds Marshelle Woodward
- 11. The feminist worlds of Margaret Cavendish David Cunning
- 12. Augustus reigns, but poets still are low: Aphra Behn's world in the emperor of the moon (1687) Elaine Hobby
- Part IV. Rethinking Early Modern Types and Stereotypes:
- 13. Learning to imitate women: male education and the grammar of female experience Catherine Loomis
- 14. Mothers and widows: world-making against stereotypes in early modern English women's manuscript writings Pamela Hammons
- 15. Queer virgins: nuns, reproductive futurism, and early modern English culture Jaime Goodrich
- 16. Defensor Feminae: Aemilia Lanyer and Rachel Speght Elizabeth Hodgson
- 17. Margaret Cavendish's Melancholy identity: gender and the evolution of a Genre Tina Skouen and Henriette Kolle.
