Ashgate Critical Essays On Women Writers In England 1550 1700

This volume includes leading scholarship on five writers active in the first half of the sixteenth century: Margaret More Roper, Katherine Parr, Anne Askew, Mildred Cooke Cecil and Anne Cooke Bacon. The essays represent a range of theoretical approaches and provide valuable insights into the religious, social, economic and political contexts essential for understanding these writers' texts. The introduction surveys the development of the field as an interdisciplinary project involving literature, history, classics, religion and cultural studies.

Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer have emerged as important literary figures in the past 10 years and scholars have realised that their often unorthodox works challenge conceptions about women's engagement with early modern secular and religious literary culture. This volume collects some of their most influential essays.

The last twenty-five years have seen exciting new developments in scholarly work on Lady Mary Wroth, whose Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus constitute the first romance and the first sonnet sequence to be published by an Englishwoman. Wroth's writings enter into a suggestive and gendered dialogue with the lyric and narrative works of her uncle, Sir Philip Sidney, even as they carve out a place for her own literary experiments. This volume gathers together some of the most striking recent criticism addressing Wroth's oeuvre; many of its essays also discuss the intellectual and cultural contexts in which she wrote. The collection is prefaced by an extended editorial overview of scholarship in the field.

Until recently, Anne Clifford has been known primarily for her Knole Diary, edited by Vita Sackville-West, which recounted her steadfast resistance to the most authoritative figures of her culture, including James I, as she insisted on her right to inherit her father's title and lands. Lucy Hutchinson was known primarily as the biographer of her husband, a Puritan leader during the English Civil Wars. The essays collected here examine not only these texts but, in Clifford's case, her architectural restorations and both the Great Book which she had compiled and the Great Picture which she commissioned, in order to explore the identity she fashioned for herself as a property owner, matriarchal head of her family, patron and historian. In Hutchinson's case, recent scholars have turned their attention to her poetry, her translation of Lucretius and her biblical epic, Order and Disorder, to analyze her contributions to early modern scientific and political writing and to place her work in relation to Milton's Paradise Lost.

Drawing together essays and articles from a disparate group of scholarly journals and collective volumes, some now difficult to obtain, this series of seven volumes offers a selection from the best work in the field of early modern women. Presented in a compact, easy-to-access format, this series is especially useful for scholars new to the area as well as for experienced scholars who may have overlooked an important essay published in a journal with limited circulation.

Research into the scholarly work on Lady Mary Wroth, whose Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus constitute the first romance and the first sonnet sequence to be published by an Englishwoman, has seen many new developments in the last twenty-five years. This volume gathers together some of the most striking recent criticism addressing Wroth's oeuvre; many of its essays also discuss the intellectual and cultural contexts in which she wrote. The collection is prefaced by an extended editorial overview of scholarship in the field.

"The opportunities offered by the explosion of knowledge about early modern women writers in the past two decades also pose a sometimes formidable challenge. For some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English women writers-Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth, Aemilia Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Clifford, and Elizabeth Cary-the critical literature has already become voluminous. For others, such as Anne Lock and Lucy Hutchinson, recent editions of exceptional work provide good reason to foreground them as likely figures soon to assume prominence in the field. Drawing together essays and articles from a disparate group of scholarly journals and collective volumes, some now difficult to obtain, this series of seven volumes offers a selection from the best work in this field. Presented in a compact, easy-to-access format, this series will be especially useful for scholars new to the area as well as for experienced scholars who may have overlooked an important essay published in a journal with limited circulation. Each of the seven volumes listed below has been edited by a recognized authority in the area. Volume editors provide a substantial introduction surveying the current state of the field; a brief biographical account of the life of each writer covered in the volume; and a select bibliography for additional reading. In order to provide the most coverage without losing depth, some volumes cover multiple early modern authors. Every volume is published in hardcover and printed on acid-free paper suitable for library collections."-- Publisher's description from half-title verso.