A Princely Brave Woman

This title was first published in 2003. This collection of essays presents a variety of new approaches to the oeuvre of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, one of the most influential and controversial women writers of the seventeenth century. Reflecting the full range of Cavendish's output - which included poetry, drama, prose fictions, orations, and natural philosophy - these essays re-assess Cavendish's place in seventeenth- century literature and philosophy. Whilst approaching Cavendish's work from a range of critical (and disciplinary) perspectives, the authors of these essays are united in their commitment to recovering her writings from their frequent characterisation as "eccentric" or "idiosyncratic", and aim to present her work as historically legible within the cultural contexts in which they were written. The "Mad Madge" of literary legend and tradition is re-written as a bold, innovative and experimental creator of a female authorial voice, and as a thinker vitally in contact with the intellectual currents of her age.

"This title was first published in 2003. This collection of essays presents a variety of new approaches to the oeuvre of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, one of the most influential and controversial women writers of the seventeenth century. Reflecting the full range of Cavendish's output - which included poetry, drama, prose fictions, orations, and natural philosophy - these essays re-assess Cavendish's place in seventeenth- century literature and philosophy. Whilst approaching Cavendish's work from a range of critical (and disciplinary) perspectives, the authors of these essays are united in their commitment to recovering her writings from their frequent characterisation as "eccentric" or "idiosyncratic", and aim to present her work as historically legible within the cultural contexts in which they were written. The "Mad Madge" of literary legend and tradition is re-written as a bold, innovative and experimental creator of a female authorial voice, and as a thinker vitally in contact with the intellectual currents of her age."--Provided by publisher.

Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections explores the relationship between the plays of Shakespeare and the writings of Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673). The essays contained in this volume fit together as studies of various sorts of influence, both literary and historical, setting Cavendish's appropriation of Shakespearean characters and plot structures within the context of the English Civil Wars and the Fronde.The essays trace Shakespeare's influence on Cavendish and explore the political implications of Cavendish's contribution to Shakespeare's reputation.

The tales of the 75 courageous women who gladly gave their lives to secure our freedom are narrated in the book "Forgotten Gems". In addition to the freedom fighters whose martyrdom is known to the entire world, this book talks about the brave women whose sacrifice was lost to obscurity. Along with India's freedom fighters, this book includes the names of courageous Indian women who, following their country's independence, played a significant role in both the creation of the Constitution and its upkeep. "Forgotten Gems" is a book dedicated to all real brave women, mothers and patriots. We should all have the utmost respect for these great and valiant freedom fighters and never forget their sacrifices for the nation.

This collection of new essays is a comprehensive exploration of the theoretical and practical issues surrounding the editing of texts by early modern women. The chapters consider the latest developments in the field and address a wide range of topics, including the 'ideologies' of editing, genre and gender, feminism, editing for student or general readers, print publishing, and new and possible future developments in editing early modern writing, including digital publishing. The works of writers such as Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Wroth, Anne Halkett, Katherine Philips and Katherine Austen are examined, and the issues discussed are related to the ways editing in general has evolved in recent years. This book offers readers an original overview of the central issues in this growing field and will interest students and scholars of early modern literature and drama, textual studies, the history of editing, gender studies and book history.

In the field of seventeenth-century English drama, women participated not only as spectators or readers, but more and more as patronesses, as playwrights, and later on as actresses and even as managers. This study examines English women writers' tragedies and tragicomedies in the seventeenth century, specifically between 1613 and 1713, which represent the publication dates of the first original tragedy (Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam) and the last one (Anne Finch's Aristomenes) written by a Stuart woman playwright. Through this one-hundred year period, major changes in dramatic form and ideology are traced in women's tragedies and tragicomedies. In examining the whole of the century from a gender perspective, this project breaks away from conventional approaches to the subject, which tend to establish an unbridgeable gap between the early Stuart period and the Restoration. All in all, this study represents a major overhaul of current theories of the evolution of English drama as well as offering an unprecedented reconstruction of the genealogy of seventeenth-century English women playwrights.

This is a ground-breaking edition of three seventeenth-century plays that all engage in diverse and exciting ways with questions of gender and performance. The collection, edited by three pioneering scholars of elite female culture and early modern drama, makes the texts of three much-discussed plays - John Fletcher's The Wild-Goose Chase, James Shirley's The Bird in a Cage and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure - available together in a full scholarly edition for the first time.The Wild Goose Chase (1621) and The Bird in a Cage (1633) were both performed in the commercial London theatres in the Jacobean and Caroline periods respectively. The Convent of Pleasure (1668) is a so-called 'closet' drama, designed primarily for reading but drawing on a tradition of aristocratic theatricals. In a wide-ranging co-authored introduction to the volume, the editors explore the concerns of these playtexts in relation to contemporary debates surrounding popular festivity and anti-theatricalism, as well as the agency of elite female culture in the Stuart period and the emergence of the professional female actor in the Restoration.The volume will be an invaluable teaching and research tool for students and scholars of early modern drama, women's writing and performance studies more generally, as well as providing a rich sourcebook for the reader interested in seventeenth-century theatrical culture.

Marta Straznicky offers a detailed historical analysis of early modern women's closet plays: plays explicitly written for reading, rather than public performance. She reveals that such works were part of an alternative dramatic tradition, an elite and private literary culture, which was understood as intellectually superior to and politically more radical than commercial drama. Elizabeth Cary, Jane Lumley, Anne Finch and Margaret Cavendish wrote their plays in this conjunction of the public and the private at a time when male playwrights dominated the theatres. In her astute readings of the texts, their contexts and their physical appearance in print or manuscript, Straznicky has produced many fresh insights into the place of women's closet plays both in the history of women's writing and in the history of English drama.

Royalist Women Writers aims to put women back on the map of seventeenth-century royalist literature from which they have habitually been marginalised. Looking in detail at the work of Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn, it argues that their writings inaugurate a more assertive model of the Englishwoman as literary author, which is crucially enabled by their royalist affiliations. Chalmers reveals new political sub-texts in the three writers' work and shows how these inflect their representations of gender. In this way both their texts and manner of presenting themselves as authors emerges as freshly pertinent to their male and female royalist contemporaries for whom supporting them could be an act of political self-definition.

Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama is the most complete sourcebook for the study of this growing area of inquiry. It brings together, for the first time, a collection of the key critical commentaries and historical essays - both classic and contemporary - on Renaissance women's drama. Specifically designed to provide a comprehensive overview for students, teachers and scholars, this collection combines: * this century's key critical essays on drama by early modern women by early critics such as Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot * specially-commissioned new essays by some of today's important feminist critics * a preface and introduction explaining this selection and contexts of the materials * a bibliography of secondary sources Playwrights covered include Joanna Lumley, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth and the Cavendish sisters.