Michelle M. Dowd

Lara Dodds

Early Modern Women's Writing and the Future of Literary History demonstrates that a full accounting of early modern women's literary and creative activities is necessary to the future of literary studies writ large. Despite benefiting from a rich body of scholarship and diverse critical practices, early modern women's writing is still treated as an optional or secondary component of Renaissance literary studies as a whole. In this book, Dodds and Dowd offer a state-of-the-field assessment of the critical and theoretical debates that have resulted in this state of affairs in order to advance specific visions for the future. Dodds and Dowd examine how perennial questions about authorship, canon, and literary value have historically influenced scholarship on early modern women's writing and its place within literary studies. Early modern women's writing has been perceived as belated, out of sync with dominant critical trends. Dodds and Dowd show the belatedness of early modern women's writing to be a "happy accident" that positions women's writing as a resource for the renewal of literary history. In both the classroom and in scholarship, early modern women's writing shows the way forward for the field, whether in the revitalization of formalist approaches to literature through an alliance with feminism or in the integration of newer critical methodologies such as premodern critical race studies. This book demonstrates that a feminist literary history that places women's writing at its center is essential to the future of English Renaissance literary studies. There is, in other words, no history of English Renaissance literature without women writers.

Early Modern Women's Writing and the Future of Literary History

Tom Rutter

How does our understanding of early modern performance, culture and identity change when we decentre Shakespeare? And how might a more inclusive approach to early modern drama help enable students to discuss a range of issues, including race and gender, in more productive ways? Underpinned by these questions, this collection offers a wide-ranging, authoritative guide to research on drama in Shakespeare's England, mapping the variety of approaches to the context and work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By paying attention to repertory, performance in and beyond playhouses, modes of performance, and lost and less-studied plays, the handbook reshapes our critical narratives about early modern drama. Chapters explore early modern drama through a range of cultural contexts and approaches, from material culture and emotion studies to early modern race work and new directions in disability and trans studies, as well as contemporary performance. Running through the collection is a shared focus on contemporary concerns, with contributors exploring how race, religion, environment, gender and sexuality animate 16th- and 17th-century drama and, crucially, the questions we bring to our study, teaching and research of it. The volume includes a ground-breaking assessment of the chronology of early modern drama, a survey of resources and an annotated bibliography to assist researchers as they pursue their own avenues of inquiry. Combining original research with an account of the current state of play, The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama will be an invaluable resource both for experienced scholars and for those beginning work in the field.

Perspectives on Culture, Performance and Identity

The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama

Julie A. Eckerle

By taking account of the ways in which early modern women made use of formal and generic structures to constitute themselves in writing, the essays collected here interrogate the discursive contours of gendered identity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The contributors explore how generic choice, mixture, and revision influence narrative constructions of the female self in early modern England. Collectively they situate women's life writings within the broader textual culture of early modern England while maintaining a focus on the particular rhetorical devices and narrative structures that comprise individual texts. Reconsidering women's life writing in light of recent critical trends-most notably historical formalism-this volume produces both new readings of early modern texts (such as Margaret Cavendish's autobiography and the diary of Anne Clifford) and a new understanding of the complex relationships between literary forms and early modern women's 'selves'. This volume engages with new critical methods to make innovative connections between canonical and non-canonical writing; in so doing, it helps to shape the future of scholarship on early modern women.

Genre and Women's Life Writing in Early Modern England

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.

Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

Early modern England's system of patrilineal inheritance, in which the eldest son inherited his father's estate and title, was one of the most significant forces affecting social order in the period. Demonstrating that early modern theatre played a unique and vital role in shaping how inheritance was understood, Michelle M. Dowd explores some of the common contingencies that troubled this system: marriage and remarriage, misbehaving male heirs, and families with only daughters. Shakespearean drama helped question and reimagine inheritance practices, making room for new formulations of gendered authority, family structure, and wealth transfer. Through close readings of canonical and non-canonical plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Jonson, and others, Dowd pays particular attention to the significance of space in early modern inheritance and the historical relationship between dramatic form and the patrilineal economy. Her book will interest researchers and students of early modern drama, Shakespeare, gender studies, and socio-economic history.

The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage

The first full-length study of the ways in which Shakespearean drama influenced and expanded notions of inheritance in early modern England.

Michelle M. Dowd

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