Women Writers in Renaissance England

Women Writers in Renaissance England PDF Author: Randall Martin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317862910
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
Of all the new developments in literary theory, feminism has proved to be the most widely influential, leading to an expansion of the traditional English canon in all periods of study. This book aims to make the work of Renaissance women writers in English better known to general and academic readers so as to strengthen the case for their future inclusion in the Renaissance literary canon. This lively book surveys women writers in the sixteenth century and early seventeenth centuries. Its selection is vast, historically representative, and original, taking examples from twenty different, relatively unknown authors in all genres of writing, including poetry, fiction, religious works, letters and journals, translation, and books on childcare. It establishes new contexts for the debate about women as writers within the period and suggests potential intertextual connections with works by well-known male authors of the same time. Individual authors and works are given concise introductions, with both modern and historical critical analysis, setting them in a theoretical and historicised context. All texts are made readily accessible through modern spelling and punctuation, on-the-page annotation and headnotes. The substantial, up-to-date bibliography provides a source for further study and research.

Women Writers in Renaissance England

Women Writers in Renaissance England PDF Author: Randall Martin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317862910
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Get Book

Book Description
Of all the new developments in literary theory, feminism has proved to be the most widely influential, leading to an expansion of the traditional English canon in all periods of study. This book aims to make the work of Renaissance women writers in English better known to general and academic readers so as to strengthen the case for their future inclusion in the Renaissance literary canon. This lively book surveys women writers in the sixteenth century and early seventeenth centuries. Its selection is vast, historically representative, and original, taking examples from twenty different, relatively unknown authors in all genres of writing, including poetry, fiction, religious works, letters and journals, translation, and books on childcare. It establishes new contexts for the debate about women as writers within the period and suggests potential intertextual connections with works by well-known male authors of the same time. Individual authors and works are given concise introductions, with both modern and historical critical analysis, setting them in a theoretical and historicised context. All texts are made readily accessible through modern spelling and punctuation, on-the-page annotation and headnotes. The substantial, up-to-date bibliography provides a source for further study and research.

Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation

Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation PDF Author: Katharina M. Wilson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820308654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 692

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Book Description
The dawn of humanism in the Renaissance presented privileged women with great opportunities for personal and intellectual growth. Sexual and social roles still determined the extent to which a woman could pursue education and intellectual accomplishment, but it was possible through the composition of poetry or prose to temporarily offset hierarchies of gender, to become equal to men in the act of creation. Edited by Katharina M. Wilson, this anthology introduces the works of twenty-five women writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, among them Marie Dentière, a Swiss evangelical reformer whose writings were so successful they were banned during her lifetime; Gaspara Stampa, a cultivated courtesan of Venetian aristocratic circles who wrote lyric poetry that has earned her comparisons to Michelangelo and Tasso; Hélisenne de Crenne, a French aristocrat who embodied the true spirit of the Renaissance feminist, writing both as novelist and as champion of her sex; Helene Kottanner, Austrian chambermaid to Queen Elizabeth of Hungary whose memoirs recall her daring theft of the Holy Crown of Saint Stephen for her esteemed mistress; and Lady Mary Sidney Wroth, the first Englishwoman known to write a full-length work of fiction and compose a significant body of secular poetry. Offering a seldom seen counterpoint to literature written by men, Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation presents prose and poetry that have never before appeared in English, as well as writings that have rarely been available to the nonspecialist. The women whose writings are included here are united by a keen awareness of the social limitations placed upon their creative potential, of the strained relationship between their gender and their work. This concern invests their writings with a distinctive voice--one that carries the echoes of a male aesthetic while boldly declaring battle against it.

Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance

Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance PDF Author: Elizabeth Hodgson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107079985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
This book examines the way in which early modern women writers conceived of grief and the relationship between the dead and the living.

Renaissance Women Poets

Renaissance Women Poets PDF Author: Aemilia Lanyer
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141958936
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 727

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Book Description
Whitney's two volumes of verse miscellany, 'Sweet Nosegay' (1573) and 'The Copy of a Letter' (1567), were part of a literary trend of combining classical and Biblical references with popular and vernacular sources, and reflect the growing literary appetites of the urban population. As well a selection of her original poetry, this volume includes Sidney's version of the Psalms of David and Petrach's 'Triumph of Death'. Lanyer's poetry is devotional and is the most single-minded and explicit inits advocacy of female spirituality and virtue. Included here are 'Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum' and 'The Description of Cooke-ham'.

Women Writers of the English Renaissance

Women Writers of the English Renaissance PDF Author: Kim Walker
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Did women have a Renaissance? Over the last decade much of the most eminent and significant scholarship in Renaissance studies has attempted to answer this question. Kim Walker's Women Writers of the English Renaissance takes a commanding lead among the responses. In a careful, current, and wide-ranging survey of Renaissance women writers, Walker examines the social, educational, economic, and ideological constraints under which women wrote; their attempts to move from the margin to the center of literary production; and their establishment of careers as professional writers. Both major and minor writers - poets, diarists, letter writers, romance writers, playwrights, and biographers - are discussed here in revealing, reliable, and provocative ways. Major writers including Mary Sidney, Elizabeth Cary, and Mary Wroth are presented in a new, more broad perspective. Walker's synthesis of cultural history and literary criticism makes this volume a significant accomplishment that should be read by every scholar and student of the culture and literature of Tudor and Stuart England.

Tudor and Stuart Women Writers

Tudor and Stuart Women Writers PDF Author: Louise Schleiner
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253115102
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
"... a nuanced, carefully argued work that reveals how women writers of the Renaissance, whether upper-class aristocrats close to court, daughters of successful merchants, Protestants, or Catholics, are inevitably affected by the gender biases that infuse all levels of Renaissance society and letters." -- Sixteenth Century Journal "... quite effective at developing a critical vocabulary for analyzing the formal traits of early modern women's writing." -- Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature From the perspectives of feminism, Marxism, sociology, and cultural semiotics, Louise Schleiner examines both familiar and obscure Tudor and Stuart women writers in a comprehensive study of those women who managed to go beyond translations or diaries and find a more individual voice in their public texts.

Oppositional Voices

Oppositional Voices PDF Author: Tina Kronitiris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134678029
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Oppositional Voices is a study of six women writers in the late Elizabethan period, who, ignoring Renaissance society's injunction that women should confine themselves to religious compositions, wrote and translated poetry, drama and romantic fiction. Tina Krontiris brings together their work, including at times their voiced opposition to certain oppressive ideas and stereotypes. Rather than simply glorify these voices, her study subtly probes the influence of a culture inimical to female creative activity on the writings of these women.

Major Women Writers of Seventeenth-century England

Major Women Writers of Seventeenth-century England PDF Author: James Fitzmaurice
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472066094
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
The first comprehensive anthology of seventeenth-century English women writers

Women Writers in Renaissance England

Women Writers in Renaissance England PDF Author: Randall Martin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317862902
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
Of all the new developments in literary theory, feminism has proved to be the most widely influential, leading to an expansion of the traditional English canon in all periods of study. This book aims to make the work of Renaissance women writers in English better known to general and academic readers so as to strengthen the case for their future inclusion in the Renaissance literary canon. This lively book surveys women writers in the sixteenth century and early seventeenth centuries. Its selection is vast, historically representative, and original, taking examples from twenty different, relatively unknown authors in all genres of writing, including poetry, fiction, religious works, letters and journals, translation, and books on childcare. It establishes new contexts for the debate about women as writers within the period and suggests potential intertextual connections with works by well-known male authors of the same time. Individual authors and works are given concise introductions, with both modern and historical critical analysis, setting them in a theoretical and historicised context. All texts are made readily accessible through modern spelling and punctuation, on-the-page annotation and headnotes. The substantial, up-to-date bibliography provides a source for further study and research.

Desiring Women Writing

Desiring Women Writing PDF Author: Jonathan Goldberg
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804729833
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In a set of readings ranging from early-sixteenth- through late-seventeenth-century texts, this book aims to resituate women’s writing in the English Renaissance by studying the possibilities available to these writers by virtue of their positions in their culture and by their articulation of a variety of desires (including the desire to write) not bound by the usual prescriptions that limited women. The book is in three parts. The first part begins by pursuing linkages between feminine virtue and the canonical status of texts written by women of the period. It then confronts some received opinions and opens up new possibilities of evaluation through readings of Aemelia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and poems, plays, and fiction by Aphra Behn. The second part studies translation as an allowed (and therefore potentially devalued) sphere for women’s writing, and offers accounts of Margaret Roper’s translation of Erasmus and Mary Sidney’s of Petrarch to show ways in which such work makes a central claim in Renaissance culture. In the third part, the author explores the thematics and practices of writing as exemplified in the women’s hands in an early Tudor manuscript and through the character of Graphina in Elizabeth Cary’s Mariam. Throughout, possibilities for these writers are seen to arise from the conjunction of their gender with their status as aristocrats or from their proximity to centers of power, even if this involves the “debasement” of prostitution for Lanyer or the perils of the marketplace for Behn. The author argues that moves outside the restriction of domesticity opened up opportunities for affirming female sexuality and for a range of desires not confined to marriage and procreation—desires that move across race in Oroonoko; that imagine female same-gender relations, often in proximity to male desires directed at other men; that implicate incestuous desires, even inflecting them anally, as in Roper’s Devout Treatise.