The History of British Women's Writing, 1610-1690 Volume Three

by Suzuki, Mihoko

• ISBN13: 9781137517968
• ISBN10: 1137517964
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2015-07-01
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

During the seventeenth century, in response to political and social upheavals such as the English Civil Wars, the Exclusion Crisis, and the Popish Plot, women produced a wide variety writings in both manuscript and print. This volume, now available in paperback, represents recent scholarship that has uncovered new texts as well as introduced new paradigms to further our understanding of women's literary history during this tumultuous period. Topics include the category of the 'woman writer' and networks among writers; the interplay between pamphlet and literary culture; the prominence of religious discourse in women's writing; new perspectives on established genres such as poetry, drama, fiction; the recovery of until recently neglected sites of writing such as manuscripts and funeral monuments; reassessment of the value and import of the genre of letters; and new approaches to texts both now canonical and newly discovered through the lenses of sexuality, science and race studies, postcolonialism, orientalism, political thought, and military studies.

Author Biography

Mihoko Suzuki is Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of Miami, USA. She is the author, most recently, of Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1599–1688 (2003) and the co-editor of Women's Political Writings, 1610-1725 (2007).

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Chronology
1. Introduction; M.Suzuki
PART I: NETWORKS, DEBATES, TRADITIONS, DISCOURSES
2. Identifying as (Women) Writers; P.Salzman
3. Channeling the Gender Debate: Legitimation and Agency in Seventeenth-Century Tracts and Women's Poetry; M.Matchinske
4. All about Eve: Seventeenth Century Women Writers and the Narrative of the Fall; S.Miller
5. English Civil War Women Writers and the Discourses of Fifth Monarchism; K.Gillespie
PART II: MODES AND SITES
6. Seventeenth-Century Women's Manuscript Writing; V.Burke
7. Reading Seventeenth-Century Women's Letters; S.Wiseman
8. Women's Self-Portraiture in Seventeenth-Century Monuments; P.Phillippy
PART III: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LITERARY GENRES
9. 'More lively, parfett, lasting, and more true': Mary Wroth's Indefensible Apologies for Poesy; C.Kinney
10. Valuing Early Modern Women's Verse in the Twenty-first Century; P.Hammons
11. Early Modern Englishwomen Dramatists (1610-1690): New Perspectives; M.Wynne-Davies
12. History, Satire, and Fiction by British Women Writers in the Seventeenth Century; M.Reeves
PART IV: REVISIONING CONTEXTS
13. Critiquing the Sexual Economies of Early Modern Marriage in Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish's Plays; T.Jankowski
14. 'The Empire of Man over the inferiour Creatures': British Women, Race, and Seventeenth-Century Science; C.Malcolmson
15. Questioning Gender, War, and the 'Old Lie': The Military Expertise of Margaret Cavendish; J.Wright
16. Women, Civil War, and Empire: The Politics of Translation in Katherine Philips's Pompey and Horace; M.Suzuki
17. English Women's Writing and Islamic Empires, 1610-90; B.Andrea
Bibliography
Index