The History of British Women's Writing, 1610-1690

During the seventeenth century, in response to political and social upheavals such as the English Civil Wars, the Exclusion Crisis, and the Popish Plot, women produced a wide variety of writings in both manuscript and print. This volume represents recent scholarship that has uncovered new texts as well as introduces new paradigms to further our understanding of women's literary history during this tumultuous period. Topics include the category of the `woman writer' and networks among writers; the interplay between pamphlet and literar culture; the prominence of religious discourse in women's writing; new perspectives on established genres such as poetry, drama, and fiction; the recovery of until recently neglected sites of writing, such as manuscripts and funeral monuments; a reassessment of the value and import of the genre of letters; and new approaches to texts both now canonical and newly discovered through the lenses of sexuality, science and race studies, postcolonialism, orientalism, political thought, and military studies.

Mihoko Suzuki is Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of Miami, USA She is the author, most recently, of Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588-1688 (2003), and the co-editor of Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500-1700 (2002) and Women's Political Writings, 1610-1725 (2007).