Synopses & Reviews
The increased attention to women's literature of the early modern period has reinvigorated literary study, not by supplanting the traditional canon but by renewing our interest in it. As the volume editors note, "Teaching Spenser's
The Faerie Queene is a richer experience when one also teaches Wroth's
Urania."
Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers summarizes the latest scholarship on British women writers who lived from roughly 1500 to 1700 and suggests strategies for presenting their works in the classroom. Thirty-six essays discuss frequently anthologized pieces by such women as Margaret Cavendish, Elizabeth I, Mary Sidney, and Mary Wroth as well as the writings of women who have come to the notice of scholars only recently.
The volume addresses women's roles in early modern society and women's limited access to education and opportunities for writing; provides background for understanding literary, religious, historical, and social texts; gives biographies of certain writers; lists texts suitable for presentation in the undergraduate classroom; suggests models for lower-level surveys as well as semester-length graduate seminars; and details the availability of primary sources.
Review
"This collection represents absolutely first-rate scholarship--it is at present the only study of its kind, and an indispensable guide to classroom instruction and individual research in the field." --Constance Jordan, author of Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances
Review
"A boon to both novice and experienced teachers of early modern British literature." --Feminist Teacher
Synopsis
This collection of 36 essays summarizes the latest scholarship on British women writers who lived from roughly 1500 to 1700.
About the Author
Susanne Woods, provost and professor of English at Wheaton College, Massachusetts, founded the Brown University Women Writers Project. She has been professor of English and also served in academic administration at Brown University and Franklin and Marshall College. Her publications include
Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (Huntington Lib., 1984) and
Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (Oxford UP, 1999). With Elizabeth H. Hageman she is co-general editor of the Oxford University Press series Women Writers in English, 1350-1850, for which she edited
The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer (1993).
Margaret P. Hannay, professor of English literature at Siena College, has edited The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke with Noel J. Kinnamon and Michael G. Brennan (Clarendon, 1998). She is the author of Philip's Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford UP, 1990) and editor of Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent State UP, 1985).