Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England

by Clark, Sandra

• ISBN13: 9781403902122
• ISBN10: 1403902127
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-02-07
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England explores how crimes committed by women are represented in popular literature of the early modern period, in broadside ballads, domestic plays and prose pamphlets. These are forms used to present news in an age before the invention of newspapers, when news-writing conformed to different conceptions of truth-value and cultural expectations from our own. Sandra Clark's focus is not on the social reality of the crimes, but on how they were shaped as subjects for representation. Women's crimes were over-represented in proportion to their actual occurrence, but only a few types of crime made the news, chiefly husband-murder, child-murder and witchcraft. As domestic crimes, these might have had some bearing on the lives of their audiences. Sandra Clark considers not only how the generic differences between these three literary forms influenced their construction of women as criminals, but also whether some forms particularly had the capacity to address women's interests. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Sandra Clark is at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Introduction	ix
1 Early Modern News and Crime Writing: Its Literary and Ideological Context	1	(32)
2 Women's Crimes: Their Social Context and Their Representation	33	(37)
3 The Broadside Ballad	70	(36)
4 Domestic Plays	106	(39)
5 Crime News and the Pamphlet	145	(35)
Conclusion	180	(5)
Notes	185	(26)
Works Cited	211	(14)
Index	225