Women's Writing in the British Atlantic World
Women's Writing in the British Atlantic World
In this 2007 book, Kate Chedgzoy explores the ways in which women writers of the early modern British Atlantic world imagined, visited, created and haunted textual sites of memory. Asking how women's writing from all parts of the British Isles and Britain's Atlantic colonies employed the resources of memory to make sense of the changes that were refashioning that world, the book suggests that memory is itself the textual site where the domestic echoes of national crisis can most insistently be heard. Offering readings of the work of poets who contributed to the oral traditions of Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and analysing poetry, fiction and life-writings by well-known and less familiar writers such as Hester Pulter, Lucy Hutchinson and Aphra Behn, this book explores how women's writing of memory gave expression to the everyday, intimate consequences of the major geopolitical changes that took place in the British Atlantic world in the seventeenth century.
- Offers extremely wide coverage of early modern women's writing, in both geographical and chronological terms
- Recovers voices and texts that have not formed part of traditional history, including women writers from Wales, Scotland and Ireland
- Gives detailed readings of increasingly canonical texts, and new critical accounts of archival sources
Reviews & endorsements
'Kate Chedgzoy offers … a rich and wide-ranging book introducing a number of writers who have not yet been placed into the Renaissance literary canon as (re)constituted over the last two decades. These cultural productions often exist more in memory than in print, in an oral community as opposed to an established literary tradition centred on and in England. Chedgzoy's important and accessible contribution to the field continues the work of expanding this canon while simultaneously redefining the very theoretical ground on which a canon is constituted.' Clio
'Chedgzoy's admirable clarity of argument will ensure that her book remains a touchstone in a field that is beginning to achieve a place at the centre of early modern studies.' Early Modern Literary Studies
'This handbook is a useful survey of the use of memory and memorial techniques in seventeenth-century writings by women.' Mary Ann O'Donnell, The Scriblerian
Product details
July 2012Paperback
9781107405912
276 pages
229 × 152 × 15 mm
0.37kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction: 'A place on the map is also a place in history'
- 1. 'The rich store-house of her memory': the metaphors and practices of memory work
- 2. 'Writing things down has made you forget': memory, orality and cultural production
- 3. Recollecting women from early modern Ireland, Scotland and Wales
- 4. 'Shedding teares for England's loss': women's writing and the memory of war
- 5. Atlantic removes, memory's travels
- Conclusion
- Bibliography.
