Royalist Women Writers, 1650-1689

Download or read book Royalist Women Writers, 1650-1689 written by Hero Chalmers and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-10-14 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Royalist Women Writers aims to put women back on the map of seventeenth-century royalist literature from which they have habitually been marginalised. Looking in detail at the work of Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn, it argues that their writings inaugurate a more assertive model of the Englishwoman as literary author, which is crucially enabled by their royalist affiliations. Chalmers reveals new political sub-texts in the three writers' work and shows how these inflect their representations of gender. In this way both their texts and manner of presenting themselves as authors emerges as freshly pertinent to their male and female royalist contemporaries for whom supporting them could be an act of political self-definition.