Genre and Women's Life Writing in Early Modern England

Genre and Women's Life Writing in Early Modern England

Author: Michelle M. Dowd

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1317129377

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By taking account of the ways in which early modern women made use of formal and generic structures to constitute themselves in writing, the essays collected here interrogate the discursive contours of gendered identity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The contributors explore how generic choice, mixture, and revision influence narrative constructions of the female self in early modern England. Collectively they situate women's life writings within the broader textual culture of early modern England while maintaining a focus on the particular rhetorical devices and narrative structures that comprise individual texts. Reconsidering women's life writing in light of recent critical trends-most notably historical formalism-this volume produces both new readings of early modern texts (such as Margaret Cavendish's autobiography and the diary of Anne Clifford) and a new understanding of the complex relationships between literary forms and early modern women's 'selves'. This volume engages with new critical methods to make innovative connections between canonical and non-canonical writing; in so doing, it helps to shape the future of scholarship on early modern women.


Women's Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland

Women's Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland

Author: Julie A. Eckerle

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2019-06-01

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 0803299974

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Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland provides an original perspective on both new and familiar texts in this first critical collection to focus on seventeenth-century women’s life writing in a specifically Irish context. By shifting the focus away from England—even though many of these writers would have identified themselves as English—and making Ireland and Irishness the focus of their essays, the contributors resituate women’s narratives in a powerful and revealing landscape. This volume addresses a range of genres, from letters to book marginalia, and a number of different women, from now-canonical life writers such as Mary Rich and Ann Fanshawe to far less familiar figures such as Eliza Blennerhassett and the correspondents and supplicants of William King, archbishop of Dublin. The writings of the Boyle sisters and the Duchess of Ormonde—women from the two most important families in seventeenth-century Ireland—also receive a thorough analysis. These innovative and nuanced scholarly considerations of the powerful influence of Ireland on these writers’ construction of self, provide fresh, illuminating insights into both their writing and their broader cultural context.


The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700

Author: Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-01-14

Total Pages: 897

ISBN-13: 0198860633

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The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 brings together new work by scholars across the globe, from some of the founding figures in early modern women's writing to those early in their careers and defining the field now. It investigates how and where women gained access to education, how they developed their literary voice through varied genres including poetry, drama, and letters, and how women cultivated domestic and technical forms of knowledge from recipes and needlework to medicines and secret codes. Chapters investigate the ways in which women's writing was an integral part of the intellectual culture of the period, engaging with male writers and traditions, while also revealing the ways in which women's lives and writings were often distinctly different, from women prophetesses to queens, widows, and servants. It explores the intersections of women writing in English with those writing in French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, in Europe and in New England, and argues for an archipelagic understanding of women's writing in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. Finally, it reflects on--and challenges--the methodologies which have developed in, and with, the field: book and manuscript history, editing, digital analysis, premodern critical race studies, network theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 captures the most innovative work on early modern women's writing in English at present.


Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters

Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters

Author: Julie D. Campbell

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 9780754667384

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Offering a comparative and international approach to early modern women's writing, the essays gathered here focus on multiple literatures across Italy, France, England, and the Low Countries. Individual essays investigate women in diverse social classes and life stages, ranging from siblings and mothers to nuns to celebrated writers. The collection overall is invested in crossing geographic, linguistic, political, and religious borders and in exploring familial, political, and religious communities.


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

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

Author: M. Suzuki

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-01-19

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0230305504

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During the seventeenth century, in response to political and social upheavals such as the English Civil Wars, women produced writings in both manuscript and print. This volume 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 period.


Reading Early Modern Women

Reading Early Modern Women

Author: Helen Ostovich

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-08-02

Total Pages: 548

ISBN-13: 1135887683

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Much has been written about women of the English Renaissance, but few examples of women's writing from that era have been readily available until now. This remarkable anthology assembles for the first time 144 primary texts and documents written by women between 1550 and 1700 and reveals an unprecedented view of the intellectual and literary lives of women in early modern England. The writings range from poetry to philosophical treatises, addressing a wide array of subjects including law, gender, education, motherhood, medicine, religion, life-writing, and the arts. Each selection is paired with a beautifully reproduced facsimile of the text's original source manuscript, allowing a glimpse into the literary past that will lead the reader to truly appreciate the care and craft with which these women writers prepared their texts. This essential anthology is a captivating guide to the legacy of early modern women's literature and its authors that must not be overlooked.


Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature

Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature

Author: Mary Beth Rose

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 0226725731

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Rose examines the glamorous, failed destinies of heroes in plays by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe ; Queen Elizabeth I's creation of a heroic identity in her public speaches ; autobiographies of four ordinary women thrust into the public sphere by civil war ; and the seducation of heroes into slavery in works by John Milton, Aphra Behn, and Mary Astell.--Back cover.


Autobiography in Early Modern England

Autobiography in Early Modern England

Author: Adam Smyth

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-08-05

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0521761727

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Explores life-writing forms - almanacs, financial accounts, commonplace books and parish registers - which emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.


Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England

Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England

Author: Katharine Hodgkin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1351871579

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A fascinating case study of the complex psychic relationship between religion and madness in early seventeenth-century England, the narrative presented here is a rare, detailed autobiographical account of one woman's experience of mental disorder. The writer, Dionys Fitzherbert, recounts the course of her affliction and recovery and describes various delusions and confusions, concerned with (among other things) her family and her place within it; her relation to religion; and the status of the body, death and immortality. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England presents in modern typography an annotated edition of the author's manuscript of this unusual and compelling text. Also included are prefaces to the narrative written by Fitzherbert and others, and letters written shortly after her mental crisis, which develop her account of the episode. The edition will also give a modernized version of the original text. Katharine Hodgkin supplies a substantial introduction that places this autobiography in the context of current scholarship on early modern women, addressing the overarching issues in the field that this text touches upon. In an appendix to the volume, Hodgkin compares the two versions of the text, considering the grounds for the occasional exclusion or substitution of specific words or passages. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England adds an important new dimension to the field of early modern women studies.


Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century

Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century

Author: Tanya M. Caldwell

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2020-09-18

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1684482267

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Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of essays on memoir, biography, and autobiography during a formative period for the genre. Employing the methodology William Godwin outlined for novelists of taking material "from all sources, experience, report, and the records of human affairs," each contributor examines within the contexts of their time and historical traditions the anxieties and imperatives of the auto/biographer as she or he shapes material into a legacy.