Coyness and crime in restoration comedy
Subtitle: women's desire, deception, and agency
By: Peggy Thompson
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Lanham, Md
Language: eng
Number of pages: 202
ISBN-13: 9781611483727; 9781611483734
Subjects: LITERARY CRITICISM / Feminist; Literature and society; Women in literature; English drama; History and criticism; Sex role in literature; English drama (Comedy); History
Description: "Coyness and Crime examines the extraordinary focus on feminine coyness in forty English comedies by ten diverse playwrights of the late seventeenth-century. In contexts ranging from reaffirmations of church and king to emerging interests in liberty and novelty, these plays consistently reveal women caught in an ironic and nearly intractable convergence of objectification and culpability that allows them little innocent sexual agency; this is both the source and the legacy of coyness in Restoration comedy"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.