Explores the representation of revenge from Classical to early modern literature
This collection explores a range of literary and historical texts from ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Iceland and medieval and early modern England to provide an understanding of wider historical continuities and discontinuities in representations of gender and revenge.
It brings together approaches from literary criticism, gender theory, feminism, drama, philosophy and ethics to allow greater discussion between these subjects and across historical periods and to provide a more complex and nuanced understanding of the ways in which ideas about gender and revenge interrelate.
Key features:
The coverage, from classical through to renaissance literature, gives a sense of how the revenge motifs work over time with gender in mind
It will appeal to a wide readership including those working in classics; medieval and renaissance literature; gender studies; revenge and revenge tragedy; the intertextual relations between ancient, medieval and early modern texts
It considers what constitutes the literary revenge tragedy tradition, suggesting points of continuity and difference as well as rethinking the parameters of the genre
Contributors include Edith Hall, Alison Findlay and Janet Clare
Lesel Dawson is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature (OUP, 2008) and has published journal articles on John Ford, the Elizabethan succession crisis and early modern ideas about menstruation and Quentin Tarantino.
Fiona McHardy is Professor of Classics at the University of Roehampton. She is author of Revenge in Athenian Culture (London: Duckworth, 2008).