The Convent of Pleasure

The Convent of Pleasure PDF Author: Margaret Cavendish Duchess of Newcastle
Publisher: Young Writers
ISBN: 9780952553601
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 41

Get Book Here

Book Description

The Convent of Pleasure

The Convent of Pleasure PDF Author: Margaret Cavendish Duchess of Newcastle
Publisher: Young Writers
ISBN: 9780952553601
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 41

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays

The Convent of Pleasure Author: Margaret Cavendish Duchess of Newcastle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673), until recently remembered more as a flamboyant eccentric than as a serious writer, was in fact the most prolific, thought-provoking, and original woman writer of the Restoration. Cavendish is the author of many poems, short stories, biographies, memoirs, letters, philosophical and scientific works (including The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World, the first work of science fiction by a woman), and nineteen plays. "The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays collects four of Cavendish's dramatic works that are among the most revealing of her attitudes toward marriage and her desire for fame. Loves Adventures (1662) centers on a woman succeeding in war and diplomacy by passing as a man. Similarly, the heroine of Bell in Campo (1662) rescues her husband at the head of an army of women in this tale of a marriage of near equals. The Convent of Pleasure (1668) proposes a separatist community of women and has received attention for its suggestion of lesbian sexuality. The Bridals (1662), a more typical restoration comedy satirizing marriage, rounds out the collection. Edited with notes and annotation by Anne Shaver, "The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays also contains a timeline, biography and bibliography of the Duchess, an appreciation of Cavendish's life and work, and a bibliography of critical essays. Also included are all of Cavendish's epistles To the Reader as well as Other Preliminary Matter from Playes (1662), and Cavendish's original preface to Plays Never Before Printed (1668). A valuable collection from an extraordinary writer, "The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays raises important issues about women and gender.

The Sixteen Pleasures

The Sixteen Pleasures PDF Author: Robert Hellenga
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 1569478112
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
Art and poetry, mystery and desire collide in this sensual and “elegantly moving” literary romance set in the cobbled streets and painted halls of Florence, Italy (New Yorker). Margot Harrington, an American volunteer in Florence, is an expert at book conservancy. While struggling to save a waterlogged convent library, she comes across a fabulous volume of 16 erotic drawings by Giulio Romano, accompanying 16 steamy sonnets by Pietro Aretino. When first published over 4 centuries ago, the Vatican ordered all copies destroyed. This one—now unique—volume has survived. The abbess prevails upon Margot to save the order’s finances by selling the magnificently illustrated erotica discreetly—meaning without the bishop’s knowledge. Margot’s other clandestine project is a middle-aged Italian who is boldly attempting radical measures to save endangered frescoes. She is 29 and available; he, older and married. He shares her sense of mission and soon her bed in this daring story of spiritual longing and earthly desire.

Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Works

Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Works PDF Author: Vanessa L. Rapatz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501513346
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

Book Description
Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Works attends to the religious, social, and material changes in England during the century following the Reformation, specifically examining how the English came to terms with the meanings of convents and novices even after they disappeared from the physical and social landscape. In five chapters, it traces convents and novices across a range of dramatic texts that refuse easy generic classification: problem plays such as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; Marlowe's comic tragedy The Jew of Malta; Margaret Cavendish's closet dramas The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious; Aphra Behn's Restoration comedy The Rover; and seventeenth-century dialogues that include both a Catholic treatise promoting women's entrance into European convents and a proto-pornographic exposé of such convents. Convents, novices, and problem plays emerge as parallel sites of ambiguity that reflect the social, political, and religious uncertainties England faced after the Reformation.

The Blazing World

The Blazing World PDF Author: Margaret Cavendish
Publisher: E-Kitap Projesi & Cheapest Books
ISBN: 6052259256
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 151

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Blazing World, is a Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World, better known as The Blazing World, is a 1666 work of prose fiction by English writer Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. It has been described as an early fore-runner of science fiction.Here on this Figure Cast a Glance.But so as if it were by Chance,Your eyes not fixt, they must not Stay,Since this like Shadowes to the DayIt only represent's; for Still,Her Beauty's found beyond the SkillOf the best Paynter, to ImbraceThese lovely Lines within her face.View her Soul's Picture, Judgment, witt,Then read those Lines which Shee hath writt,By Phancy's Pencill drawne aloneWhich Peces but Shee, can justly owne.To The Duchesse of Newcastle,On Her New Blazing-World.Our Elder World, with all their Skill and Arts,Could but divide the World into three Parts:Columbus, then for Navigation fam'd,Found a new World, America 'tis nam'd;Now this new World was found, it was not made,Onely discovered, lying in Time's shade.Then what are You, having no Chaos foundTo make a World, or any such least ground?But your Creating Fancy, thought it fitTo make your World of Nothing, but pure Wit.Your Blazing-World, beyond the Stars mounts higher,Enlightens all with a Clestial Fier.William Newcastle.

Paper Bodies

Paper Bodies PDF Author: Margaret Cavendish
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 9781551111735
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
Margaret Cavendish was one of the most subversive and entertaining writers of the seventeenth century. She invented new genres, challenged gender roles, and critiqued the new science as well as the mores of society. “Paper Bodies” was the wonderful phrase she used to described her manuscripts, which she hoped would continue to make “a great Blazing Light” after her death. There are connections here to Cavendish’s most famous work, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666), a unique tale of a woman travelling through the north pole to a strange new world. In addition to The Blazing World, this volume includes Cavendish’s brief autobiography, A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life (1667), her play The Convent of Pleasure, and selections from her Sociable Letters, her poetry, and her critical writings. A variety of background documents by other seventeenth-century writers helps to set her work in context for the modern reader.

The Female Academy

The Female Academy PDF Author: Margaret Cavendish
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692853238
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Get Book Here

Book Description
When Margaret Cavendish published her first collection of dramatic work in 1662, she was keenly aware that none of her comedies or tragedies was unlikely to be acted, at least in her lifetime--but that did not deter her. "To those that do delight in scenes and wit / I dedicate my book," she writes at the beginning of the volume entitled, simply, "Plays." As for the hard reality that her plays were not to be produced? She has an answer for that as well: "For all the time my plays a-making were, / My brain the stage, my thoughts were acting there." "The Female Academy," the last play in her 1662 collection, opens with a fait accompli-a group of "old matrons" has established an educational institution devoted exclusively to the education of young women, "a house wherein a company of young ladies are instructed . . . to speak wittily and rationally, . . . to behave themselves handsomely, and to live virtuously." In this play, Cavendish presents the Female Academy as an institution created by women, inhabited solely by women, and operated for the benefit of women. The play also allows us to see the reactions of men, excluded from the Female Academy. Instead of ignoring the school, or wishing its young pupils well in their educational pursuits, men can't stay away-they hang around and spy on what's going on through "a large open grate" that allows them to hear the lectures being given inside. The play alternates scenes between the young women inside the Female Academy and the increasingly frustrated men in the outside world. This new edition, designed for classroom use, provides an ample introduction to Cavendish and her work, a carefully modernized text, with helpful glosses and notes, and a useful bibliography with references for further reading.

The Corner That Held Them

The Corner That Held Them PDF Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681373882
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Get Book Here

Book Description
A unique novel about life in a 14th-century convent by one of England's most original authors. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community. What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.

Lace

Lace PDF Author: Shirley Conran
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476725446
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 718

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Which one of you bitches is my mother?" Four elegant, successful, and sophisticated women in their forties are called to New York's Pierre Hotel to meet Lili -- a beautiful, young, and notoriously temperamental Hollywood movie star. None of the women knows exactly why she is there; each has a reason to hate Lili and each of them is astonished to see the others. They are old friends who share a guilty secret and who have for years been doing their best to keep that secret quiet. Their lives are changed forever, however, when Lili suddenly confronts them. When the women refuse to answer her, Lili proceeds to travel around the world through the playgrounds of the rich and famous, seeking to answer the question that has obsessed and almost destroyed her. From Paris to London, from the boardroom to the bedroom, Lace takes the reader into the rarified world of five unforgettable women who are as beautiful, as complex and as strong as...lace.

The Blazing World and Other Writings

The Blazing World and Other Writings PDF Author: Margaret Cavendish
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141904828
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious, Margaret Cavendish was one of the seventeenth century's most striking figures: a woman who ventured into the male spheres of politics, science, philosophy and literature. The Blazing World is a highly original work: part Utopian fiction, part feminist text, it tells of a lady shipwrecked on the Blazing World where she is made Empress and uses her power to ensure that it is free of war, religious division and unfair sexual discrimination. This volume also includes The Contract, a romance in which love and law work harmoniously together, and Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, which explores the power and freedom a woman can achieve in the disguise of a man.