Autobiography in Early Modern England

Autobiography in Early Modern England
Author: Adam Smyth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2010-08-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0521761727

Explores life-writing forms - almanacs, financial accounts, commonplace books and parish registers - which emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Lady Anne Halkett

Lady Anne Halkett
Author: Suzanne Linda Trill
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 135192365X

An in-depth examination of Lady Anne Halkett's writing is long overdue. Although Lady Anne Halkett is beginning to receive much warranted critical attention, to date scholars have concentrated almost exclusively on her autobiographical 'Memoirs'. Consequently, her extensive 'Select and Occasional Meditations,' have been neglected or marginalised. While these texts are devotional in nature, they also bear witness to Halkett's own sense of self and subjectivity. The structure of this edition provides the first opportunity for scholars to place Halkett's 'Memoirs' in its moment of production an in relation Halkett's other writings. In so doing, we gain a unique insight into a particular early modern woman's devotional practice and her developing subjectivity. Suzanne Trill's original introduction discusses how this combination of texts requires scholars to revise their representations of Halkett and her writing. Trill argues for a more detailed interrogation of Halkett's national and religious affliations; to this end, she offers an analysis of the religious conflicts between Scotland and England, 1660-1700, with particular reference to Halkett's representation of her ministers' experiences within this conflict. Halkett's intense engagement with contemporary social, political and religious changes makes her writing more than simply the record of an individual woman's life. This edition of selections of her writings offers a new angle on Halkett's life and writing that will be of interest to literary scholars, historians, linguists, and to those interested in women's studies in general.

The Mother's Legacy in Early Modern England

The Mother's Legacy in Early Modern England
Author: Ms Jennifer Heller
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1409478718

Using printed and manuscript texts composed between 1575 and 1672, Jennifer Heller defines the genre of the mother's legacy as a distinct branch of the advice tradition in early modern England that takes the form of a dying mother's pious counsel to her children. Reading these texts in light of specific cultural contexts, social trends, and historical events, Heller explores how legacy writers used the genre to secure personal and family status, to shape their children's beliefs and behaviors, and to intervene in the period's tumultuous religious and political debates. The author's attention to the fine details of the period's religious and political swings, drawn from sources such as royal proclamations, sermons, and first-hand accounts of book-burnings, creates a fuller context for her analysis of the legacies. Similarly, Heller explains the appeal of the genre by connecting it to social factors including mortality rates and inheritance practices. Analyses of related genres, such as conduct books and fathers' legacies, highlight the unique features and functions of mothers' legacies. Heller also attends to the personal side of the genre, demonstrating that a writer's education, marriages, children, and turns of fortune affect her work within the genre.

The Mother's Legacy in Early Modern England

The Mother's Legacy in Early Modern England
Author: Jennifer Heller
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2016-03-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317023641

Using printed and manuscript texts composed between 1575 and 1672, Jennifer Heller defines the genre of the mother's legacy as a distinct branch of the advice tradition in early modern England that takes the form of a dying mother's pious counsel to her children. Reading these texts in light of specific cultural contexts, social trends, and historical events, Heller explores how legacy writers used the genre to secure personal and family status, to shape their children's beliefs and behaviors, and to intervene in the period's tumultuous religious and political debates. The author's attention to the fine details of the period's religious and political swings, drawn from sources such as royal proclamations, sermons, and first-hand accounts of book-burnings, creates a fuller context for her analysis of the legacies. Similarly, Heller explains the appeal of the genre by connecting it to social factors including mortality rates and inheritance practices. Analyses of related genres, such as conduct books and fathers' legacies, highlight the unique features and functions of mothers' legacies. Heller also attends to the personal side of the genre, demonstrating that a writer's education, marriages, children, and turns of fortune affect her work within the genre.

Women and Literature in Britain 1800-1900

Women and Literature in Britain 1800-1900
Author: Joanne Shattock
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2001-08-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521659574

These new essays by leading scholars explore nineteenth-century women's writing across a spectrum of genres. The book's focus is on women's role in and access to literary culture in the broadest sense, as consumers and interpreters as well as practitioners of that culture. Individual chapters consider women as journalists, editors, translators, scholars, actresses, playwrights, autobiographers, biographers, writers for children and religious writers as well as novelists and poets. A unique chronology offers a woman-centered perspective on literary and historical events and there is a guide to further reading.

Royalist Women Writers, 1650-1689

Royalist Women Writers, 1650-1689
Author: Hero Chalmers
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2004-10-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191515175

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.

A Historical Dictionary of British Women

A Historical Dictionary of British Women
Author: Cathy Hartley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 522
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135355339

This reference book, containing the biographies of more than 1,100 notable British women from Boudicca to Barbara Castle, is an absorbing record of female achievement spanning some 2,000 years of British life. Most of the lives included are those of women whose work took them in some way before the public and who therefore played a direct and important role in broadening the horizons of women. Also included are women who influenced events in a more indirect way: the wives of kings and politicians, mistresses, ladies in waiting and society hostesses. Originally published as The Europa Biographical Dictionary of British Women, this newly re-worked edition includes key figures who have died in the last 20 years, such as The Queen Mother, Baroness Ryder of Warsaw, Elizabeth Jennings and Christina Foyle.