A History of Early Modern Women's Writing

Description

A History of Early Modern Women's Writing is essential reading for students and scholars working in the field of early modern British literature and history. This collaborative book of twenty-two chapters offers an expansive, multifaceted narrative of British women's literary and textual production in the period stretching from the English Reformation to the Restoration. Chapters work together to trace the contours of a diverse body of early modern women's writing, aligning women's texts with the major literary, political, and cultural currents with which they engage. Contributors examine and take account of developments in critical theory, feminism, and gender studies that have influenced the reception, reading, and interpretation of early modern women's writing. This book explicates and interrogates significant methodological and critical developments in the past four decades, guiding and testing scholarship in this period of intense activity in the recovery, dissemination, and interpretation of women's writing.

Patricia Phillippy is Professor of English Literature at Kingston University London. She has published widely in early modern literature and culture, with a special focus on women's writing. Her books include Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge 2002), Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture (2006), and Shaping Remembrance from Shakespeare to Milton (Cambridge, forthcoming). She has edited the writings of Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell for The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series.

'A thought-provoking and carefully organized collection ... the quality of the scholarship within this frame will lend itself fruitfully to all scholars working on women writers in this or any period but may be especially productive for advanced graduate students and young scholars finding their own footing in the field.' Julie A. Chappell, Renaissance Quarterly