Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture
Emerging Subjects

The impact on women of the new developments of the Renaissance, and links with postmodernist femininity.

Valerie Traub (Edited by), M. Lindsay Kaplan (Edited by), Dympna Callaghan (Edited by)

9780521558198, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 10 October 1996

320 pages, 33 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.441 kg

How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analysing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns - humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theatre - in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject. The scope of this analysis expands the terrain explored by feminist theory, while its feminist focus reveals that the subject is always gendered - although the terms in which gender is conceived and represented change across history. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture not only explores the representation of gendered subjects, but in its commitment to balancing the productive tensions of methodological diversity, also speaks to contemporary challenges facing feminism.

1. Introduction Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, Dympna Callaghan
2. Making it new: humanism, colonialism, and the gendered body in early modern culture Denise Albanese
3. Gendering mortality in early modern anatomies Valerie Traub
4. Wound man: Coriolanus, gender and the theatrical construction of interiority Cynthia Marshall
5. 'The world I have made': Margaret Cavendish, feminism, and the Blazing-World Rosemary Kegl
6. Reading, writing, and other crimes Frances E. Dolan
7. Culinary spaces, colonial spaces: the gendering of sugar in the seventeenth century Kim F. Hall
8. Caliban versus Miranda: race and gender conflicts in post-colonial re-writings of The Tempest Jyotsna G. Singh
9. Rape, repetition, and the politics of closure in A Midsummer Night's Dream Laura Levine
10. Subjection and subjectivity: Jewish law and female autonomy in Reformation English marriage M. Lindsay Kaplan
'Where there can be no cause of affection': redefining virgins, their desires, and their pleasures in John Lyly's Gallathea Theodora A. Jankowski
The terms of gender: 'gay' and feminist Edward II Dympna Callaghan.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]