Women and romance fiction in the English Renaissance
By: Helen Hackett.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Cambridge, U.K; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 235
Subjects: English fiction -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism; Love stories, English -- History and criticism; Women -- Books and reading -- England -- History -- 16th century; Women -- Books and reading -- England -- History -- 17th century; Women and literature -- England -- History -- 16th century; Women and literature -- England -- History -- 17th century; Women -- England -- Intellectual life; Renaissance -- England
Description: "This book offers an original study of lyric form and social custom in the Elizabethan age. Ilona Bell explores the tendency of Elizabethan love poems not only to represent an amorous thought, but to conduct the courtship itself. Where recent studies have focused on courtship, patronage and preferment at court, her focus is on love poetry, amorous courtship, and relations between Elizabethan men and women. The book examines the ways in which the tropes and rhetoric of love poetry were used to court Elizabethan women (not only at court and in the great houses, but in society at large) and how the women responded to being wooed, in prose, poetry and speech. Bringing together canonical male poets and recently discovered women writers, Ilona Bell investigates a range of texts addressed to, written by, read, heard or transformed by Elizabethan women, and charts the beginnings of a female lyric tradition."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 216-229) and index.
Table of contents: title: The readership of Renaissance romance; title: Renaissance romance and modern romance; title: Novellas of the 1560s and 1570s; title: Spanish and Portuguese romances; title: Fictions addressed to women by Lyly, Rich and Greene; title: The Arcadia : readership and authorship; title: The Arcadia : heroines; title: The Faerie Queene; title: Shakespeare's romance sources; title: Lady Mary Wroth's Urania; title: Epilogue, the later seventeenth century.