Renaissance Fantasies : The Gendering of Aesthetics in Early Modern Fiction

by Prendergast, Maria Teresa Micaela

• ISBN13: 9780873386449
• ISBN10: 0873386442
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-01-01
• Publisher: Kent State Univ Pr

Summary

Renaissance Fantasies is the first full-length study to explore why a number of early modern writers put their masculine literary authority at risk by writing from the perspective of feminity and effeminacy. While current studies focus on the implications of writing from the perspective of the marginalized, Prendergast's wide-ranging investigation of polemical treatises, lyrics, prose fiction, and drama demonstrates how cultural constructions of gender reflect and refract aesthetic crises of the early modern period.

Author Biography

Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast is currently teaching at the College of Wooster.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Prodigality, Effeminacy, Fantasy	1	(14)
Sidney, Nashe, Anger, and the Renaissance Aesthetics of Effeminacy	15	(27)
Exchanges of Women and Words: Etienne Pasquier's Rewriting of The Courtier	42	(25)
Effeminacy and the Anxiety of Originality: Astrophil and Stella and the Rime Sparse	67	(19)
Prose, Femininity, and the Prodigal Triangle in the Decameron and The Old Arcadia	86	(31)
``The Truest Poetry'': Gender, Genre, and Class in As You Like It and A Defence of Poetry	117	(15)
Conclusion: Illusions of Originality	132	(5)
Appendix	137	(4)
Notes	141	(44)
Bibliography	185	(18)
Index	203