Dido's Daughters

Dido's Daughters PDF Author: Margaret W. Ferguson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226243184
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
Winner of the 2004 Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and the 2003 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as Margaret Ferguson reveals in Dido's Daughters, this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, she shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes of literacy toward more vernacular forms of speech and writing. Fegurson's aim in this long-awaited work is twofold: to show that what counted as more valuable among these competing literacies had much to do with notions of gender, and to demonstrate how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations. Looking at writers whom she dubs the figurative daughters of the mythological figure Dido—builder of an empire that threatened to rival Rome—Ferguson traces debates about literacy and empire in the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cary, and Aphra Behn, as well as male writers such as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Wyatt. The result is a study that sheds new light on the crucial roles that gender and women played in the modernization of England and France.

Dido's Daughters

Dido's Daughters PDF Author: Margaret W. Ferguson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226243184
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
Winner of the 2004 Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and the 2003 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as Margaret Ferguson reveals in Dido's Daughters, this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, she shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes of literacy toward more vernacular forms of speech and writing. Fegurson's aim in this long-awaited work is twofold: to show that what counted as more valuable among these competing literacies had much to do with notions of gender, and to demonstrate how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations. Looking at writers whom she dubs the figurative daughters of the mythological figure Dido—builder of an empire that threatened to rival Rome—Ferguson traces debates about literacy and empire in the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cary, and Aphra Behn, as well as male writers such as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Wyatt. The result is a study that sheds new light on the crucial roles that gender and women played in the modernization of England and France.

Case Sensitive

Case Sensitive PDF Author: A. K. Turner
Publisher: Bonnier Zaffre Ltd.
ISBN: 1804180602
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST CRIME/THRILLERS OF 2023 **DON'T MISS CASSIE RAVEN'S NEWEST MYSTERY, DEAD FALL, AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER NOW!** 'I LOVE THIS SERIES!' ELLY GRIFFITHS 'TIMELY, GRITTY AND DARK' PAULA HAWKINS 'THIS SERIES IS NOT TO BE MISSED' THE GUARDIAN Camden mortuary technician Cassie Raven returns to solve another intriguing forensic mystery. Perfect for fans of Tess Gerritsen, Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs. Deadly secrets are rising from the depths Mortuary technician Cassie Raven has seen thousands of dead bodies in her day job, but when a drowned man knocks against the hull of her narrowboat, it's a bit too close to home. DS Phyllida Flyte thinks she recognises the John Doe with the golden-green eyes and wants to go the extra mile to give him back his name. Feeling unable to trust her colleagues, a desperate Flyte turns to Cassie for help. Together, Cassie and Flyte will dredge up deadly secrets - secrets that will draw Flyte down a perilous path. At best she risks career suicide; at worst, she'll end up dead herself. FEATURED IN HEAT MAGAZINE, THE SUNDAY TIMES AND THE GUARDIAN. PRAISE FOR THE CASSIE RAVEN SERIES: 'Spellbinding storytelling' Val McDermid 'Like Silent Witness but more believable' Susi Holliday 'Blackly humorous, with a fabulously one-of-a-kind protagonist' Heat Magazine 'Ingenious and sardonically written' Financial Times '[A] gritty novel with an engaging heroine' Sunday Times 'A terrific, well-placed plot' Spectator 'Cassie Raven is a lot of fun to spend time with' Big Issue 'Excellent fun, compulsive and Cassie Raven is a protagonist I want to meet again soon' James Oswald 'Cassie Raven is a blast of fresh air, striding onto the crime scene like a punk superstar' Sarah Hilary 'Move over Silent Witness - Cassie Raven is an utterly compelling contemporary forensic heroine' Isabelle Grey 'A fresh and exciting new series' Claire McGowan 'One of the best series openers I've read in years' Jane Casey

Who Hears in Shakespeare?

Who Hears in Shakespeare? PDF Author: Laury Magnus
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1611474752
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This volume, examining the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays are designed for hearers as well as spectators, has been prompted by recent explorations of the auditory dimension of early modern drama by such scholars as Andrew Gurr, Bruce Smith, and James Hirsh. To look at the dynamics of hearing in Shakespeare’s plays involves a paradigm shift that changes how we understand virtually everything about them, from the architecture of the buildings, to playing spaces, to blocking, and to larger interpretative issues, including our understanding of character based on players’ responses to what they hear, mishear, or refuse to hear. Who Hears in Shakespeare? Auditory Worlds on Stageand Screen is comprised of three sections on Shakespeare’s texts and performance history: “The Poetics of Hearing and the Early Modern Stage”; “Metahearing: Hearing, Knowing, and Audiences, Onstage and Off”; and “Transhearing: Hearing, Whispering, Overhearing, and Eavesdropping in Film and Other Media.” Chapters by noted scholars explore the complex reactions and interactions of onstage and offstage audiences and show how Shakespearean stagecraft, actualized on stage and adapted on screen, revolves around various situations and conventions of hearing—soliloquies,, asides, avesdropping, overhearing, and stage whispers. In short, Who Hears in Shakespeare? enunciates Shakespeare’s nuanced, powerful stagecraft of hearing. The volume ends with Stephen Booth’s afterword, his inspiring meditation on hearing that considers Shakespearean “audiences” and their responses to what they hear—or don’t hear—in Shakespeare’s plays.

Imagining Early Modern Histories

Imagining Early Modern Histories PDF Author: Elizabeth Ketner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134803974
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Interpreting textual mediations of history in early modernity, this volume adds nuance to our understanding of the contributions fiction and fictionalizing make to the shape and texture of versions of and debates about history during that period. Geographically, the scope of the essays extends beyond Europe and England to include Asia and Africa. Contributors take a number of different approaches to understand the relationship between history, fiction, and broader themes in early modern culture. They analyze the ways fiction writers use historical sources, fictional texts translate ideas about the past into a vernacular accessible to broad audiences, fictional depictions and interpretations shape historical action, and the ways in which nonfictional texts and accounts were given fictional histories of their own, intentionally or not, through transmission and interpretation. By combining the already contested idea of fiction with performance, action, and ideas/ideology, this collection provides a more thorough consideration of fictional histories in the early modern period. It also covers more than two centuries of primary material, providing a longer perspective on the changing and complex role of history in forming early modern national, gendered, and cultural identities.

Gender, Speech, and Audience Reception in Early Modern England

Gender, Speech, and Audience Reception in Early Modern England PDF Author: Kathleen Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315465752
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
This book makes a significant contribution to recent scholarship on the ways in which women responded to the regulation of their behavior by focusing on representations of women speakers and their audiences in moments Smith identifies as "scenes of speech." This new approach, examining speech exchanges between a speaker and audience in which both anticipate, interact with, and respond to each other and each other's expectations, demonstrates that the prescriptive process involves a dynamic exchange in which each side plays a role in establishing and contesting the boundaries of acceptable speech for women. Drawing from a wide range of evidence, including pamphlets, diaries, illustrations, and plays, the book interprets the various and at times contradictory representations and reception of women’s speech that circulated in early modern England. Speech scenes examined within include wives' speech to their husbands in private, private speech between women, public speech before death, and the speech of witches. Looking at scenes of women’s speech from male and female authors, Smith argues that these early modern texts illustrate a means through which societal regulations were negotiated and modified. This book will appeal to those with an interest in early modern drama, including the playwrights Shakespeare, Cary, Webster, Fletcher, and Middleton, as well as readers of non-dramatic early modern literary texts. The volume is of particular use for scholars working in the areas of early modern literature and culture, women’s history, gender studies, and performance studies.

The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England

The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England PDF Author: Holly Crawford Pickett
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512825654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
In The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England, Holly Crawford Pickett reconceptualizes early modern religious identity by exploring the astonishing stories of serial converts: historical figures such as William Alabaster, Kenelm Digby, William Chillingworth, and Marc Antonio De Dominis, along with fictional ones, who changed their religious affiliations between Catholicism and Protestantism multiple times. Pickett argues that serial converts both reveal and helped revise early modern understandings of the self. Through investigation of the techniques that serial converts used to stage and justify their conversions, Pickett demonstrates the performative nature of the act of conversion itself, offering a counternarrative to the paradigm of sincere, private conversion that was on the rise in the tumultuous years following the Reformation. Drawing from archival investigation into the lives and works of serial converts and performance studies theory, this book shows how the genres and conventions associated with conversion shaped not only forms of communication but also the very experience of conversion. By juxtaposing plays about serial conversion—by Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger, Thomas Middleton, Elizabeth Cary, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare—with spiritual autobiographies, Pickett highlights the shared task of convert and playwright: performing conversion for an audience. Serial converts served as uncomfortable reminders to their contemporaries that religious identity is always unverifiable. The first study to explore serial conversion as a discrete phenomenon in this era, The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England challenges confessional divisions within much early modern historiography by analyzing the surprising convergence of Protestant and Catholic in the figure of the serial convert. It also reveals a neglected strain of religious discourse in early modern England that valued mutability and flexibility even in the midst of hardening and increasingly narrow understandings of conversion.

What You Will

What You Will PDF Author: Kathryn Schwarz
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205030
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
In What You Will Kathryn Schwarz traces a curious pattern in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century representations of femininity: women pose a threat when they conform too willingly to social conventions. Exemplary texts describe chaste women who kill their rapists, constant wives who make marriage a debilitating obligation, and devoted mothers who destroy the fitness of children. These cautionary tales draw attention to the more ordinary, necessary choices that take prescribed roles as a mandate for purposeful acts. For early modern narratives, writes Schwarz, intentional compliance poses a complex problem: it sustains crucial tenets of order and continuity but unsettles the hierarchical premises from which those tenets derive. Feminine will appears as a volatile force within heterosociality, lending contingent security to a system that depends less on enforced obedience than on contract and consent. The book begins with an examination of early modern disciplines that treat will as an aspect of the individual psyche, of rhetoric, and of sexual and gendered identities. Drawing on these readings, Schwarz turns to Shakespearean works in which feminine characters articulate and manage the values that define them, revealing the vital force of conventional acts. Her analysis engages with recent research that has challenged the premise of feminine subordination, both by identifying alternative positions and by illuminating resistance within repressive structures. Schwarz builds on this awareness of disparate modes and sites of action in formulating the book's central questions: With what agency, and to what effect, do feminine subjects inhabit the conventions of femininity? In what sense are authenticity and masquerade inseparable aspects of social performance? How might coercive systems produce effective actors? What possibilities emerge from the paradox of prescribed choice? Her conclusions have implications not only for early modern scholarship but also for histories of gender and sexuality, queer studies, and theories of the relationship between subjectivity and ideological constraint.

Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries PDF Author: Domenico Lovascio
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501514059
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries explores the crucial role of Roman female characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While much has been written on male characters in the Roman plays as well as on non-Roman women in early modern English drama, very little attention has been paid to the issues of what makes Roman women ‘Roman’ and what their role in those plays is beyond their supposed function as supporting characters for the male protagonists. Through the exploration of a broad array of works produced by such diverse playwrights as Samuel Brandon, William Shakespeare, Matthew Gwynne, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Thomas May, and Nathaniel Richards under three such different monarchs as Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries contributes to a more precise assessment of the practices through which female identities were discussed in literature in the specific context of Roman drama and a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which accounts of Roman women were appropriated, manipulated and recreated in early modern England.

Novel Cleopatras

Novel Cleopatras PDF Author: Nicole Horejsi
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442667400
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Advocating a revised history of the eighteenth-century novel, Novel Cleopatras showcases the novel’s origins in ancient mythology, its relation to epic narrative, and its connection to neoclassical print culture. Novel Cleopatras also rewrites the essential role of women writers in history who were typically underestimated as active participants of neoclassical culture, often excluded from the same schools that taught their brothers Greek and Latin. However, as author Nicole Horejsi reveals, a number of exceptional middle-class women were actually serious students of the classics. In order to dismiss the idea that women were completely marginalized as neoclassical writers, Horejsi takes up the character of Dido from ancient Greek mythology and her real-life counterpart Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt. Together, the legendary Dido and historical Cleopatra serve as figures for the conflation of myth and history. Horejsi contends that turning to the doomed queens who haunted the Roman imagination enabled eighteenth-century novelists to seize the productive overlap among the categories of history, romance, the novel, and even the epic.

The Works of Charlotte Smith, Part II vol 8

The Works of Charlotte Smith, Part II vol 8 PDF Author: Stuart Curran
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000749304
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Charlotte Turner Smith held a central position during the formative years of the British Romantic period. Smith's work includes eleven novels and two fictional adaptations from the French. This edition reveals the extent to which Smith's work in this form constitutes as significant an achievement as her poetry.