Böcker av Marion Wynne-Davies

Although women of the Renaissance were expected to be chaste, silent and obedient, many women poets risked the disapproval of their own society and transcended the strictures of contemporary female behavior in words that still resonate today. Their meditations on the danger and sufferings of motherhood and their descriptions of the vagaries of love, while couched in the formal style of Renaissance poetry, often appear startlingly close to modern experience. As a consequence, the range of poetry produced by Renaissance women is remarkably broad. In Women Poets of the Renaissance the poetry of these women is collected for the first time in an anthology that offers the twentieth-century reader a fresh and unique approach to literature of the period.

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 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.

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 book offers a comprehensive overview of Margaret Atwood's poetry, novels, shorter fiction, children's books, criticism and experimental multi-genre work.