Seventeenth-Century English Romance

Seventeenth-Century English Romance

Author: A. Zurcher

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2007-05-28

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0230605133

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Overturning the common characterization of Seventeenth Century English prose romance as an exhausted, imitative genre with little bearing on the evolution of the novel, this book argues that early modern romance was a central forum for exploring the newly pressing moral-philosophical and political problem of self-interest.


Right Romance

Right Romance

Author: Emily Griffiths Jones

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2020-04-23

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 0271085428

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this book, Emily Griffiths Jones examines the intersections of romance, religion, and politics in England between 1588 and 1688 to show how writers during this politically turbulent time used the genre of romance to construct diverse ideological communities for themselves. Right Romance argues for a recontextualized understanding of romance as a multigeneric narrative structure or strategy rather than a prose genre and rejects the common assumption that romance was a short-lived mode most commonly associated with royalist politics. Puritan republicans likewise found in romance strength, solace, and grounds for political resistance. Two key works that profoundly influenced seventeenth-century approaches to romance are Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which grappled with romance’s civic potential and its limits for a newly Protestant state. Jones examines how these works influenced writings by royalists and republicans during and after the English Civil War. Remaining chapters pair writers from both sides of the war in order to illuminate the ongoing ideological struggles over romance. John Milton is analyzed alongside Margaret Cavendish and Percy Herbert, and Lucy Hutchinson alongside John Dryden. In the final chapter, Jones studies texts by John Bunyan and Aphra Behn that are known for their resistance to generic categorization in an attempt to rethink romance’s relationship to election, community, gender, and generic form. Original and persuasive, Right Romance advances theoretical discussion about romance, pushing beyond the limits of the genre to discover its impact on constructions of national, communal, and personal identity.


Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales

Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales

Author: Bronwyn Reddan

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2020-12

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1496223934

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Love is a key ingredient in the stereotypical fairy-tale ending in which everyone lives happily ever after. This romantic formula continues to influence contemporary ideas about love and marriage, but it ignores the history of love as an emotion that shapes and is shaped by hierarchies of power including gender, class, education, and social status. This interdisciplinary study questions the idealization of love as the ultimate happy ending by showing how the conteuses, the women writers who dominated the first French fairy-tale vogue in the 1690s, used the fairy-tale genre to critique the power dynamics of courtship and marriage. Their tales do not sit comfortably in the fairy-tale canon as they explore the good, the bad, and the ugly effects of love and marriage on the lives of their heroines. Bronwyn Reddan argues that the conteuses' scripts for love emphasize the importance of gender in determining the "right" way to love in seventeenth-century France. Their version of fairy-tale love is historical and contingent rather than universal and timeless. This conversation about love compels revision of the happily-ever-after narrative and offers incisive commentary on the gendered scripts for the performance of love in courtship and marriage in seventeenth-century France.


An Anthology of Seventeenth-century Fiction

An Anthology of Seventeenth-century Fiction

Author: Paul Salzman

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 9780192839558

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Few readers today are aware of the vigorous prose experiments undertaken in the seventeenth century. This anthology presents a representative selection of that work, with examples from Aphra Benn, John Bunyan, William Congreve, Percy Herbert, and Thomas Dangerfield. Also included are MaryWroth's feminist romance Urania and Margaret Cavendish's female utopia The Blazing World , in print here for the first time since their original publication.


His Last Mistress

His Last Mistress

Author: Andrea Zuvich

Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub

Published: 2013-05-20

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9781490425566

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Set in the tumultuous late 17th Century, His Last Mistress tells the true story of the final years in the life of James Scott, the dashing but doomed Duke of Monmouth, and Lady Henrietta Wentworth. As the popular but illegitimate eldest son of King Charles II, the Duke is a spoiled, lecherous man. With both a wife and a mistress, this rakish libertine is nevertheless captivated by the innocence of young Lady Henrietta Wentworth, who has been raised to covet her virtue. Will she succumb? At the same time, the Duke begins to harbour risky political ambitions which may threaten not only his life but also that of those around him. Will the path he chooses lead him to bloody rebellion, or peace and happiness? His Last Mistress is a passionate, sometimes explicit, carefully researched and ultimately moving story of love and loss, set against a backdrop of dangerous political unrest, brutal religious tensions, and the looming question of who will be the next King.


Seventeenth-century Fiction

Seventeenth-century Fiction

Author: Jacqueline L. Glomski

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0198737262

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A multi-authored study of the emergence and transmission of fictional writing in Europe in the seventeenth century, with the aim of improving understanding of the origins of the novel.


The Concept of Love in 17th and 18th Century Philosophy

The Concept of Love in 17th and 18th Century Philosophy

Author: Herman de Dijn

Publisher: Leuven University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 905867651X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Love is joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause." Spinoza's definition of love manifests a major paradigm shift achieved by seventeenth-century Europe, in which the emotions, formerly seen as normative "forces of nature," were embraced by the new science of the mind.This shift has often been seen as a transition from a philosophy laden with implicit values and assumptions to a more scientific and value-free way of understanding human action. But is this rational approach really value-free? Today we tend to believe that values are inescapable, and that the descriptive-mechanical method implies its own set of values. Yet the assertion by Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz, and Enlightenment thinkers that love guides us to wisdom-and even that the love of a god who creates and maintains order and harmony in the world forms the core of ethical behavior-still resonates powerfully with us. It is, evidently, an idea Western culture is unwilling to relinquish.This collection of insightful essays offers a range of interesting perspectives on how the triumph of "reason" affected not only the scientific-philosophical understanding of the emotions and especially of love, but our everyday understanding as well.


English Prose of the Seventeenth Century 1590-1700

English Prose of the Seventeenth Century 1590-1700

Author: Roger Pooley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-06

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1317901584

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is the first book-length history of the range of seventeenth-century English prose writing. Roger Pooley's study begins with narrative, ranging from the fiction of Bunyan and Aphra Behn to the biographical and autobiographical work of Aubrey and Pepys. Further sections consider religious prose from the hugely influential Authorised Version to Donne's sermons, the political writing of figures as diverse as Milton, Hobbes, Locke and Marvell, cornucopian texts and the writings of the new scientists from Bacon to Newton. At a time when the boundaries of the `canon' are being increasingly revised, this is not only a major survey of a series of great works of literature, but also a fascinating social history and a guide to understanding the literature of the period as a whole.