Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500-1700 - Hardcover

Malcolmson, Cristina And Mihoko Suzuki:

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312294573 ISBN 13: 9780312294571

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002

Synopsis

This book explores the construction of gender ideology in early modern England through an analysis of the querelle des femmes - the debate about the relationship between the sexes that originated on the continent during the middle ages and the Renaissance and developed in England into the Swetnam controversy, which revolved around the publication of Joseph Swetnam's The arraignment of lewd, forward, and inconstant women and the pamphlets which responded to its misogynist attacks. The volume contextualizes the debate in terms of its continental antecedents and elite manuscript circulation in England, then moves to consider popular culture and printed texts from the Jacobean debate and its effects on women's writing and the developing discourse on gender, and concludes with an examination of the ramifications of the debate during the Civil War and Restoration. Essays focus attention on the implications of the gender debate for women writers and their literary relations, cultural ideology and the family, and political discourse and ideas of nationhood.

About this title

About the Author

CHRISTINA MALCOLMSON is Associate Professor of English and former Chair of Women's Studies at Bates College. Her previous books include Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic and Longman Critical Readers: Renaissance Poetry.

MIHOKO SUZUKI is Associate Professor of English and former Director of Women's Studies at the University of Miami. She is the author of Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic and editor of Critical Essays on Edmund Spenser.

Review

"...this volume establishes a threshold of excellence that will become the ideal for later scholarship to emulate." - A.C. Labriola, Choice

"This is a rich and unusual collection of essays. The book differs strikingly from most collections of essays because it not only studies past debates focused on questions of gender but also stages - in an intelligent, well-controlled, but refreshingly sharp way - a modern critical activity of debating gender. The editors introduction is superb, as are their strategies for organizing this set of highly original and cogently-argued essays." - Margaret Ferguson, University of California at Davis

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0312294573
• ISBN 13: 9780312294571
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 279