The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture is a contribution to the revival of early modern women's writings and cultural production in English that began in the 1980s. Its originality is twofold: it links women's writing in English with the wider context of Baroque culture, and it introduces the issue of gender into discussion of the Baroque. The title comes from Julia Kristeva's study of Teresa of Avila, that 'the secrets of Baroque civilization are female'. The book is built on a schema of recurring Baroque characteristics -- narrativity, hyperbole, melancholia, kitsch, and plateauing, pointing less to surface manifestations and more to underlying ideological tensions. The crucial concept of the book is developed in detail. Particular attention is given to Gertrude More, Mary Ward, Aemilia Lanyer, The Ferrar/Collet women, Mary Wroth, the Cavendish sisters, Hester Pulter, Anne Hutchinson, and finally Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn, whose lives and writings point to the developing cultural transition to the Enlightenment.

These issues of city-building and institutional change involved more than the familiar push and pull of interest groups or battles between bosses, reformers, immigrants, and natives. Revell explores the ways in which technical values - a distinctive civic culture of expertise - helped to reshape ideas of community, generate new centers of public authority, and change the physical landscape of New York City."--Jacket.

This book answers three simple questions. First, what mistaken assumptions do we make about the early modern period when we ignore women's literary contributions? Second, how might we come to recognise women's influence on the history of literature and culture, as well as those instances of outright pathbreaking mastery for which they are so often responsible? Finally, is it possible to see some women writers as world-makers in their own right, individuals whose craft cut into cultural practice so incisively that their shaping authority can be traced well beyond their own moment? The essays in this volume pursue these questions through intense archival investigation, intricate close reading, and painstaking literary-historical tracking, tracing in concrete terms sixteen remarkable women and their world-shaping activities.

"This volume contains the edited proceedings from the 1990 symposium "Attending to Women in Early Modern England," which was sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies and the University of Maryland at College Park. Edited by Betty S. Travitsky and Adele F. Seeff in collaboration with a national committee of scholars, the book focuses on the interdisciplinary study of women in early modern England, addressing such areas of scholarly concern as what new research concepts can guide scholarship on early modern women? How were the public and private identities of these women constructed? What were the similarities between visible and invisible women in early modern England? How can - and should - studies on early modern women transform the classroom?"--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In this study, J. Douglas Canfield contends that baroque disruption persists even as English literature becomes more neoclassical. It twists forms and meanings. From paradoxical, mysterious moments in Paradise Lost, amazing metaphorics in Cavendish and Philips, momentous materializations in Waller and Dorset, and revealing displacements in Buckingham and Rochester to outrageous attack in Dryden and Pope, astonishing ventriloquizing in Killigrew and Finch and Montagu, and eccentricity and grotesquerie in Gulliver's Travels - the baroque comes back to disturb neoclassical regularity.--BOOK JACKET.

Dowd investigates literature's engagement with the gendered conflicts of early modern England by examining the narratives that seventeenth-century dramatists created to describe the lives of working women.

This book contains expansive, multifaceted narrative of British women's literary and textual production from the Reformation to the Restoration.