Royalist Women Writers, 1650-1689

by Hero Chalmers

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191515170
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	10/14/2004
Series:	Oxford English Monographs
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	933 KB

About the Author

Cambridge University

Table of Contents

1. The Gallery of Heroick Women': Margaret Cavendish and the Images of the Author
2. 'Her Harmonious Numbers': The Politics of Friendship in the Poems and Plays of Katherine Philips
3. 'Above a Theatre and Beyond a Throne': Cavendish, Philips, and the Potency of Feminized Retreat
4. 'Secret Instructions': Aphra Behn's Negotiation of the Political Marketplace
Bibliography