Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

In Feeling as a Foreign Language, award-winning poet and critic Alice Fulton considers poetry's uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. How does poetry create feeling? What are fractal poetics? In a series of provocative, beautifully written essays concerning "the good strangeness of poetry," Fulton contemplates the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome, the aesthetics of complexity theory, and the need for "cultural incorrectness." She also meditates on electronic, biological, and linguistic screens; falls in love with an outrageous 17th-century poet; argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters; and calls for a courageous poetics of "inconvenient knowledge." Contents Preamble I. Process Head Notes, Heart Notes, Base Notes Screens: An Alchemical Scrapbook II. Poetics Subversive Pleasures Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Eclectic Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions III. Powers The Only Kangaroo among the Beauty Unordinary Passions: Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle Her Moment of Brocade: The Reconstruction of Emily Dickinson IV. Praxis Seed Ink To Organize a Waterfall V. Penchants A Canon for Infidels Three Poets in Pursuit of America The State of the Art Main Things ri0 VI. Premises The Tongue as a Muscle A Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge

Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama is the most complete sourcebook for the study of this growing area of inquiry. It brings together, for the first time, a collection of the key critical commentaries and historical essays - both classic and contemporary - on Renaissance women's drama. Specifically designed to provide a comprehensive overview for students, teachers and scholars, this collection combines: * this century's key critical essays on drama by early modern women by early critics such as Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot * specially-commissioned new essays by some of today's important feminist critics * a preface and introduction explaining this selection and contexts of the materials * a bibliography of secondary sources Playwrights covered include Joanna Lumley, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth and the Cavendish sisters.

A completely new examination of mid-seventeenth-century verse from the British Islands, this work questions and discards the old label "Cavalier Poetry" and argues for a literary interpretation that demonstrates the verse as a canon rich in tumultuous, pluralistic, and radical writing.

A major task confronting today's scholars is the reclamation from near oblivion of a multitude of works of art, literature, music, scholarship, and other creative enterprises by eighteenth-century women. This fascinating collection provides a multifaceted approach to understanding the roles played by women as both creators of and subjects within works of art in the eighteenth century.

The period 1678-1730 was a decisive one not only in Western political history but also in the history of the British press. Changing conditions for political expression and an expanding book trade enabled unprecedented opportunities for political activity. The Women of Grub Street argues that women already at work in the London book trade were among the first to seize those new opportunities for public political expression. Synthesizing areas of scholarly inquiry previously regarded as separate, and offering a new model for the study of the literary marketplace, The Women of Grub Street examines not only women writers, but also printers, booksellers, ballad-singers, hawkers, and other producers and distributors of printed texts. Original both in its sources and in the claims it makes for the nature, extent, and complexities of women's participation in print culture and public politics, it provides a wealth of new information about middling and lower-class women's political and literary lives, and shows that these women were not merely the passive distributors of other people's political ideas. The central argument of the book is that women of the widest possible variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and religio-political allegiances in fact played so prominent a role in the production and transmission of political ideas through print as to belie simultaneous powerful claims that women had no place in public life. R The first full-length study to suggest the degree of involvement of women in the entire process of print creation at this important moment, The Women of Grub Street supports a number of important revisionary arguments with a broad range of literary and archival evidence. It will be of interest to readers of literature, social and publishing history, women's studies and feminism, and the history of democracy and public discourse.

Authorship and Appropriation is the first full-length study of the cultural and economic status of playwriting in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and argues that the period was a decisive one in the transition from Renaissance conceptions of authorship towards modern ones. In Shakespeare's time, the creative originality and independence of voice had been little prized. Playwrights had appropriated materials from earlier writings with little censure, while the practice of collaboration among dramatists had been taken for granted. Paulina Kewes demonstrates that, in the decades following the Restoration, those attitudes were challenged by new conceptions of dramatic art which required authors to be the sole begetters of their works. This book explores a series of developments in the theatrical marketplace which increased both the rewards and the prestige of the dramatist, and shows the Restoration period to have been one of serious and animated debate about the methods of playwriting. Against that background, Kewes offers a fresh account of the formation of the canon of English drama, revealing how the moderns - Dryden, Otway, Lee, Behn, and then their successors Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar - acquired an esteem equal, even superior, to their illustrious predecessors Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher.