Engendering the fall
Subtitle: John Milton and seventeenth-century women writers
By: Shannon Miller.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Philadelphia, Pa
Language: eng
Number of pages: 280
ISBN-13: 9780812240863
Subjects: Milton, John, -- 1608-1674; Milton, John, -- 1608-1674 -- Influence; Milton, John, -- 1608-1674 -- Political and social views; English literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism; English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism; Fall of man in literature; Sex role in literature; Women in literature; Patriarchy in literature; Women and literature -- England -- History -- 17th century; Women authors, English -- 17th century -- Political and social views
Other titles: John Milton and seventeenth-century women writers
Description: "The narrative of the Garden of Eden infused seventeenth-century political thought no less than it reflected attitudes toward the relationship between the sexes. Within the contemporary debate over political legitimacy, theorists who supported or questioned the monarchy turned explicitly to the narrative of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve to articulate their theories of governmental authority.

Engaging this foundational relationship between gendered interpersonal and governmental organization, Shannon Miller turns to a body of texts produced in England that replot the story of the Garden. She sets a series of writings by women into conversation with the period's most important poetic rendering of the Fall, Milton's Paradise Lost, to illustrate how significant gender was to accounts of social and political organization, and to demonstrate how the Garden narrative plots the role of gender. Her multidirectional and multilayered conversation between numerous seventeenth-century women--such as Aemilia Lanyer, Rachel Speght, Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, and Mary Chudleigh - and Milton's Genesis epic crystallizes the interplay between the narrative of the Fall, the organization of political structures, and the extent to which both were shaped by cultural debates over the role of women."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [255]-268) and index.
Table of contents: title: Serpentine Eve : plotting gender in the seventeenth-century garden; title: Gazing, gender, and the construction of governance in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve deus rex judaeorum and Milton's Paradise lost; title: Milton among the prophets : inspiration and gendered discourse in the mid-seventeenth century; title: Maternity, marriage, and contract : Lucy Hutchinson's response to patriarchal theory in Order and disorder; title: The two faces of Eve : gendering knowledge and the "new" science in Paradise lost and Margaret Cavendish's Blazing world; title: Rewriting creation : Mary Chudleigh's The song of the three children paraphras'd and Paradise lost; title: Spaces and traces of the garden story in Aphra Ben and Mary Astell : mapping female subjectivit(ies) through patriarchialist discourse; title: Conclusion : influencing traditions of interpretation.