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Featuring the most frequently taught female writers and texts of the early modern period, this Companion introduces the reader to the range, complexity, historical importance, and aesthetic merit of women's writing in Britain from 1500–1700. Presenting key textual, historical, and methodological information, the volume exemplifies new and diverse approaches to the study of women's writing. The book is clearly divided into three sections, covering: how women learnt to write and how their work was circulated or published; how and what women wrote in the places and spaces in which they lived, worked, and worshipped; and the different kinds of writing women produced, from poetry and fiction to letters, diaries, and political prose. This structure makes the volume readily adaptable to course usage. The Companion is enhanced by an introduction that lays out crucial framework and critical issues, and by chronologies that situate women's writings alongside political and cultural events.

This book reveals women writers' key role in constituting seventeenth-century public culture and, in doing so, offers a new reading of that culture as begun in intimate circles of private dialogue and extended along transnational networks of public debate.

Considering as evidence literary texts, historical documents, and material culture, this interdisciplinary study examines the entry into public political culture of women and apprentices in seventeenth-century England, and their use of discursive and literary forms in advancing an imaginary of political equality. Subordinate Subjects traces to the end of Elizabeth Tudor's reign in the 1590s the origin of this imaginary, analyses its flowering during the English Revolution, and examines its afterlife from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. It uses post-Marxist theories of radical democracy, post-structuralist theories of gender, and a combination of political theory and psychoanalysis to discuss the early modern construction of the political subject. Subordinate Subjects makes a distinctive contribution to the study of early modern English literature and culture through its chronological range, its innovative use of political, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories, and its interdisciplinary focus on literature, social history, political thought, gender studies, and cultural studies. Contents: Introduction; Apprentices and the national-popular; Gender and the political imaginary; Women's writing and the politics of history; Petitioning apprentices, petitioning wives; 'Royalist' women and the English Revolution; Apprentices, wives, 'whores' and the political nation; Women, print culture, and the public sphere; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index. Mihoko Suzuki is Professor of English at the University of Miami. She is the author of Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Cornell University Press 1989), editor of Critical Essays on Edmund Spenser (Macmillan, 1996) and co-editor, with Cristina Malcolmson, of Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500-1700 (Palgrave, 2002).

This book begins from the premise that when Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, published her first printed work in 1653, she ushered in a new, more openly assertive and generically diverse model of Englishwomen's authorship. Investigating the historical and literary conditions which enabled such a development, it argues for the vital role played by royalism in fostering the emergence of Cavendish along with that of Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn, the two other female authors who most visibly achieved similarly prominent literary profiles around the time of the Restoration. The book offers a detailed account of these women's engagements with the different aspects of royalist culture salient to their literary production, each in their particular historical moment. New political sub-texts are revealed in their work and used to refine notions of their gender representations. 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.

Women writers played a central role in the literature and culture of eighteenth-century Britain. Featuring essays on female writers and genres by leading scholars in the field, this Companion introduces readers to the range, significance and complexity of women's writing across multiple genres in Britain between 1660 and 1789. Divided into two parts, the Companion first discusses women's participation in print culture, featuring essays on topics such as women and popular culture, women as professional writers, women as readers and writers, and place and publication. Additionally, part one explores the ways women writers crossed generic boundaries. The second part contains chapters on many of the key genres in which women wrote including poetry, drama, fiction (early and later), history, the ballad, periodicals, and travel writing. The Companion also provides an introduction surveying the state of the field, an integrated chronology, and a guide to further reading.

This book contains an account of writing by women from the mid 16th century through to 1700. It also traces the way a representative sample of that writing was published, circulated in manuscript, read, anthologised, reprinted, and discussed from the time it was produced through to the present day. Salzman's study covers an enormous range of women from all areas of early modern society, and it covers examples of the many and varied genres produced by these women, from plays to prophecies, diaries to poems, autobiographies to philosophy. As well as introducing the wealth of material produced by women in the early modern period, this book examines changing responses to what was written, tracing a history of reception and transmission that amounts to a cultural history of changing taste.

Colonial Women is the first comprehensive study to explore the interpenetrating discourses of gender and race in Stuart drama. Analyzing the plays of Shakespeare, Fletcher, Davenant, Dryden, Behn and other playwrights, Heidi Hutner argues that in drama, as in historical accounts, the symbol of the native woman is used to justify and promote the success of the English appropriation, commodification, and exploitation of the New World and its native inhabitants.