A Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing

by Arturo Pacheco; Editor: Anita Pacheco (The Open University)

• ISBN13: 9780470692776
• ISBN10: 0470692774
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2008-04-01
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This timely volume represents one of the first comprehensive, student-oriented guides to the under-published field of early modern women's writing. It brings together new work by twenty-four of the best contemporary scholars who are pushing forward the boundaries of scholarship on early modern women's writing from both sides of the Atlantic. The contributions balance a specific focus on individual texts with a broader examination of the relevant social and cultural contexts of early modern women's writing, its generic diversity and some of the main theoretical questions that underpin its study. Ten key texts are considered, along with the major genres in which early modern women wrote and the theoretical issues to which their work gives rise. The volume provides readers with a clear sense of the full extent of women's contributions to literary culture in early modern Britain. It will be welcomed by all those who teach courses on women writers and early modern women writers, and by those who wish to integrate more women writers into their Renaissance courses.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Contexts

Women and Education

Religion and the Construction of the Feminine

Women, Property and Law

Women and Work

Women and Writing

Readings

Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosegay

Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, Psalmes

Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum

Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam and History

Mary Wroth, The Countess of MontgomeryÆs Urania

Margaret Cavendish, A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life

Anna Trapnel, Anna Trapnel's Report and Plea

Katherine Philips, Poems

Aphra Behn, The Rover, Part 1

Mary Astell: Critic of the Marriage Contract/Social Contract Analogue

Genres

Autobiography

Defences of Women

Prophecy

Women's Poetry 1550-1700: æNot Unfit to be Read'

Prose Fiction

Drama

Issues and Debates

The Work of Women in the Age of Electronic Reproduction: The Canon, Early Modern Women Writers and the Postmodern Reader

Feminist Historiography

Index

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