The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama

Download or read book The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama written by N. Liebler and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes a new direction for feminist studies in English Renaissance drama. While feminist scholars have long celebrated heroic females in comedies, many have overlooked female tragic heroism, reading it instead as evidence of pervasive misogyny on the part of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Displacing prevailing arguments of "victim feminism," the contributors to this volume engage a wide range of feminist theories, and argue that female protagonists in tragedies - Jocasta, Juliet, Cleopatra, Mariam, Webster's Duchess and White Devil, among others - are heroic in precisely the same ways as their more notorious masculine counterparts.