Title: Desiring women writing
First published: 1997
Description: In a set of readings ranging from early-sixteenth- through late-seventeenth-century texts, this book aims to resituate women's writing in the English Renaissance by studying the possibilities available to these writers by virtue of their positions in their culture and by their articulation of a variety of desires (including the desire to write) not bound by the usual prescriptions that limited women.

Throughout, possibilities for these writers are seen to arise from the conjunction of their gender with their status as aristocrats or from their proximity to centers of power, even if this involves the "debasement" of prostitution for Lanyer or the perils of the marketplace for Behn.

The author argues that moves outside the restriction of domesticity opened up opportunities for affirming female sexuality and for a range of desires not confined to marriage and procreation - desires that move across race in Oroonoko; that imagine female same-gender relations, often in proximity to male desires directed at other men; that implicate incestuous desires, even inflecting them anally, as in Roper's Devout Treatise.
Subjects: History, English literature, Women and literature, History and criticism, Renaissance, Women authors, Desire in literature, Femininity in literature, Women, English literature, history and criticism, early modern, 1500-1700, English literature, women authors, Women, great britain, Renaissance, england, Women in literature
Places: England
Time periods: 17th century, Early modern, 1500-1700, Renaissance, 1450-1600, 16th century
LC classification: PR113 .G65 1997