eBook

Royalist women writers 1650-1689

Chalmers, Hero

2004

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Clarendon Press,Oxford University Press,Oxford University Press, Incorporated
• Subject: Behn, Aphra, 1640-1689 -- Criticism and interpretation / English literature / English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism / English literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism / Literary Studies (Civil War and Restoration) / Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers) / Literary Studies (Women's Writing) / Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of, 1624?-1674 -- Criticism and interpretation / Philips, Katherine, 1631-1664 -- Criticism and interpretation / Politics and literature / Politics and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 17th century / Royalists / Royalists -- Great Britain -- History -- 17th century / Royalists -- Great Britain -- Intellectual life / Royalists in literature / Women and literature / Women and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 17th century
• ISBN: 9780199273270, 0199273278