Women's Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550-1700

Description

In this 2007 book, Kate Chedgzoy explores the ways in which women writers of the early modern British Atlantic world imagined, visited, created and haunted textual sites of memory. Asking how women's writing from all parts of the British Isles and Britain's Atlantic colonies employed the resources of memory to make sense of the changes that were refashioning that world, the book suggests that memory is itself the textual site where the domestic echoes of national crisis can most insistently be heard. Offering readings of the work of poets who contributed to the oral traditions of Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and analysing poetry, fiction and life-writings by well-known and less familiar writers such as Hester Pulter, Lucy Hutchinson and Aphra Behn, this book explores how women's writing of memory gave expression to the everyday, intimate consequences of the major geopolitical changes that took place in the British Atlantic world in the seventeenth century.

Kate Chedgzoy is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Newcastle.

'Kate Chedgzoy offers ... a rich and wide-ranging book introducing a number of writers who have not yet been placed into the Renaissance literary canon as (re)constituted over the last two decades. These cultural productions often exist more in memory than in print, in an oral community as opposed to an established literary tradition centred on and in England. Chedgzoy's important and accessible contribution to the field continues the work of expanding this canon while simultaneously redefining the very theoretical ground on which a canon is constituted.' Clio 'Chedgzoy's admirable clarity of argument will ensure that her book remains a touchstone in a field that is beginning to achieve a place at the centre of early modern studies.' Early Modern Literary Studies 'This handbook is a useful survey of the use of memory and memorial techniques in seventeenth-century writings by women.' Mary Ann O'Donnell, The Scriblerian