Beyond agency: Women writing romance as political intervention in the English Revolution
Item
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Title
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Beyond agency: Women writing romance as political intervention in the English Revolution
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:c81d2b489dd5:10002
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identifier
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10130
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Creator
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Narramore, Kathryn Coad,
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Contributor
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Carrie Hintz
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Date
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2009
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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English literature | Womens studies | Bradstreet | Du Verger | Judith Man | Print | Romance | Weamys
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Abstract
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This project examines four sub-aristocratic seventeenth-century women who wrote romance and historical narrative as political interventions during the social upheaval of the English Revolution: Judith Man defends Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, to Parliament in her translation, An Epitome of the history of faire Argenis and Polyarchus (1640), of a French abridgement of John Barclay's Argenis; Suzanne Du Verger advocates for Catholics in her two translations of Jean-Pierre Camus' French romances, Admirable Events (1639) and Diotrephe (1641), as well as in Du Verger's Humble Reflections (1657), a vitriolic response to Margaret Cavendish's The World's Olio (1655); Anne Bradstreet rejects English "romance" for New English history in The Tenth Muse (1650); and Anna Weamys reexamines women's political roles in her royalist yet moderate A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1651).;In order to reconstruct the political contributions of each author to their varied political causes, I examine the conversations between their texts and paratexts, how their books speak to and for their authors' social positions, their revisions of the uses of romance, and their political subtexts. Each woman belonged to a class that had unusual access to the aristocracy because of their service to noble families, although they themselves had no real claim to titles or were gentry. They adapt the genre of romance, which had been so often used as a discourse of aristocratic display, for their own political purposes, which range from defending Catholicism to revising the Puritan Plymouth Bay Colony's approaches to internal dissent. I argue that these authors sought agency to redress political grievances rather than to achieve authorship. When seen together, these texts constitute a new involvement for sub-aristocratic women in imaginative literature, one that continues after the Restoration.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
