1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910684571003321

Autore

Higginbotham Jennifer

Titolo

Girlhood of Shakespeare's Sisters : gender transgression, adolescence / / Jennifer Higginbotham

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Edinburgh : , : Edinburgh University Press, , 2013

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (240 pages) : illustrations

Collana

Edinburgh critical studies in Renaissance culture

Disciplina

820.9003

Soggetti

English literature - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History and criticism

Characters and characteristics

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

'A wentche, a gyrle, a damsell' : defining early modern girlhood -- Roaring girls and unruly women : producing femininities -- Female infants and the engendering of humanity -- Where are the girls in English renaissance drama? -- Voicing girlhood : women's life writing and narratives of childhood -- Epilogue : mass-produced languages and the end of touristic choices.

Sommario/riassunto

The first sustained study of girls and girlhood in early modern literature and culture Jennifer Higginbotham makes a persuasive case for a paradigm shift in our current conceptions of the early modern sex-gender system. She challenges the widespread assumption that the category of the 'girl' played little or no role in the construction of gender in early modern English culture. And she demonstrates that girl characters appeared in a variety of texts, from female infants in Shakespeare's late romances to little children in Tudor interludes to adult 'roaring girls' in city comedies. This monograph provides the first book-length study of the way the literature and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries constructed the category of the 'girl'. Key Features. * Charts the emergence of the word 'girl' into early modern English and its evolution from a gender-neutral term applied to both male and female children to one used only for female individuals * Challenges the misconception that girls were largely absent from English Renaissance literature * Offers a literary history of female child characters in Renaissance drama, from Tudor interludes to the plays of



Shakespeare and his contemporaries to later seventeenth-century closet dramas * Features an examination of how women writers described their own girlhoods Keywords. Girls, Girlhood, Renaissance, Early Modern England, Gender, Sexuality, Shakespeare, Children, Childhood, Femininity, Women Writers.