Marion Wynne-Davies

This invaluable guide offers readers an accessible and imaginative approach to the literature of early modern Britain. Exploring the poetry, drama and prose of the period, Marion Wynne-Davies combines theory and practice, providing a helpful introduction to key theoretical concepts and close readings of individual texts by both canonical and less well-known authors. Amongst other things, Wynne-Davies discusses sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry in its political and cultural contexts, considers Renaissance drama in terms of performance space, and uses the early modern map to explain the prose works of writers such as Bunyan and Cavendish.

Drawing upon modern theoretical precepts and presenting new research on tombs of English women writers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this study investigates the ways in which early modern women writers construct and are constructed by discourses of mortality. Marion Wynne-Davies analyses how women wrote about mortality, how they 'staged' death, how they were written about when they died and the construction of their tombs as a final statement of public gender roles. Each chapter focuses upon a key women writer from the period”Mary Sidney Herbert, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Wroth and Aphra Behn”to present a new way of understanding female identity in the English Renaissance. In each example, Wynne-Davies presents her research on the woman writer's tomb in order to explore the parallels and contrasts between how the writers constructed themselves and how they were constructed after death. Engaging with the theoretical approaches and undertaking research on texts and monuments, this book explores memorialisation in order to demonstrate that death is essential to our understanding of the subjectivity of women writers in early modern England. Considering the most recent scholarship on early modern English women writers, memorialisation discourses, and textual evocations of female subjectivity, this study brings together a radical evocation of otherness that serves to challenge the dominant political, religious and social discourses of the day.

This book traces the chronological development of Atwood’s global reputation from Canadian nationhood to world-wide politics and from the role of women to gender identity. Chapters offer a comprehensive overview of her poetry, novels, shorter fiction, children’s books, criticism and experimental multi-genre work. There are more detailed analyses of Atwood’s most influential writing, from her first novels such as Surfacing and The Edible Woman, through the works that ensured her international reputation such as The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride, to her most recent work, Alias Grace and Oryx and Crake. Wynne-Davies presents these works through an overall understanding of Atwood’s intelligence, humour, linguistic dexterity, breadth of vision and ethical integrity.

This invaluable guide offers readers an accessible and imaginative approach to the literature of early modern Britain. Exploring the poetry, drama and prose of the period, Marion Wynne-Davies combines theory and practice, providing a helpful introduction to key theoretical concepts and close readings of individual texts by both canonical and less well-known authors. Amongst other things, Wynne-Davies discusses sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry in its political and cultural contexts, considers Renaissance drama in terms of performance space, and uses the early modern map to explain the prose works of writers such as Bunyan and Cavendish.

This volume presents a broad range of critical essays exemplifying different approaches to Shakespeare's two comedies, The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado about Nothing. The essays approach the plays from a number of theoretical positions: feminist, historicist, deconstruction and psychoanalytic, as well as offering general commentary and a discussion of film versions and stage productions. The introduction explains the development of these critical pieces, making the two plays considered accessible to students at all levels.

This is the first full-length study of the role of women in Arthurian literature. It covers writing from the medieval period, the Renaissance, the Victorian age and in contemporary fiction. Covering the key Arthurian texts, such as Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Morte D'arthur, Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Tennyson's Idylls, it also investigates the less well-known works by women: Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion, Julia Margaret Cameron's illustration to Tennyson's works and, finally, the Arthurian women writers of the twentieth century.

This is the first full-length study of the role of women in Arthurian literature. It covers writing from the medieval period, the Renaissance, the Victorian age and in contemporary fiction. Covering the key Arthurian texts, such as Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Morte D'arthur, Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Tennyson's Idylls, it also investigates the less well-known works by women: Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion, Julia Margaret Cameron's illustration to Tennyson's works and, finally, the Arthurian women writers of the twentieth century.