Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation

by Lewis,Jayne

• ISBN13: 9780415114806
• ISBN10: 0415114802
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-12-17
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Examining visual, musical and literary works from the late Tudor period to the First World War,Mary Queen of Scotstraces a nation's long romance with the queen it once rejected. Considering both mainstream works (from Edmund Spenser to Sir Walter Scott) and the attachments to Mary that have been formed and sustained by certain subaltern groups, particularly women, Jayne Lewis separates Mary's life from the myth that formed about her and shows how her prevailing image as a sexualized mother has made her a complicated object of political and personal desire. Lewis demonstrates how this desire emerged at a formative moment in the history of modern Britain, and, over time, subliminally shaped that very history.

Table of Contents

List of plates	ix	(2)
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(12)
PART I Elizabethan Mary	13	(48)
1 "The finest she that ever was": Scotland, 1558-1568	17	(21)
2 "The treason of pity": England, 1568-1603	38	(23)
PART II Stuart Mary	61	(38)
3 "A new and unexampled kind of tomb," 1603-1714	65	(21)
4 "False kindred": The Island Queens and The Albion Queens	86	(13)
PART III Georgian Mary	99	(72)
5 "The sorrow of seeing the queen," 1714-1789	103	(21)
6 "Dozens of ugly Mary Queen of Scotts": the women of Britain, 1725-1785	124	(23)
7 Guilt and vindication, 1789-1837	147	(24)
PART IV Victorian Mary	171	(52)
8 Victoria's other woman	177	(24)
9 A "laboured illusion" vanishes	201	(22)
PART V Epilogue: Postmodern Mary	223	(10)
Notes	233	(20)
Index	253