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The Elizabethan period saw a boom in the publication of romances by male authors. Many of these, Helen Hackett argues, were directed at an imagined female audience, advertising to male readers the voyeuristic pleasures of fictions supposedly read in women's bedchambers.
Yet within a hundred years this imagined audience gave way to real women romance-readers and even women romance-writers.
Cambridge Core - Renaissance and Early Modern Literature - Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance - by Helen Hackett. "Provocative and lively. Like any ambitious study, Hackett's book intriduces as many new questions into the critical arena as it answers, but in doing so, it takes .
Exploring this crucial transitional period, Hackett examines the work of a diverse range of writers from Lyly, Rich and Greene to Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare. Her book culminates in an analysis of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania , the first romance written by a woman and considers the developing representation of female heroism and selfhood, especially the adaptation of saintly roles to secular and even erotic purposes.
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In Stock. Seller Inventory APC Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Hackett begins her book by rightly pointing out that existing records of sixteenth century reading habits do not show a particularly great interest in romances among the female readership, and that literacy statistics of the period in fact tend to undercut ideas of a large Elizabethan female readership for texts of any kind.
Her historically sensitive approach to literacy and readership issues challenges the work of earlier scholars such as Louis B. Wright by foregrounding the change in the composition of the reading public from the s to the s, when an increasing number of women began taking an active interest in the reading and even writing of romances.
Hackett's first chapter, "The Readership of Renaissance Romance," argues that the conflation of readership records from the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries in previous studies of Elizabethan fiction often provide a skewed impression of the readership available to romance writers in the period, thus suggesting that an existing and burgeoning community of female readers was the major cause for the rise of Elizabethan romance. In contrast, she urges that it is necessary "to distinguish between different moments in a period of transition and process" 9 and to acknowledge that a change in women's responses to romance occurred within a space of less than a hundred years.
Robert Greene's Pandosto, the source for Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, is a typical example; it tells the story of the King of Bohemia, his daughter Fawnia and her lover Dorastus, Prince of Sicilia, set in some unspecified past age when perplexed rulers were inclined to consult the Oracle at Delphos. It is true that it is often in representations of Renaissance romance as 'low' that women readers are foregrounded. Returning user. William Napier, The Great Siege: Clash of Empires , about the Siege of Malta in , in which 30, Ottoman Turks besieged a Mediterranean island held by just knights and a few thousand soldiers. Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England. In the vernacular, the Canterbury Tales showed female narrators among the male ones. Unfortunately this solution does not quite resolve all aspects of the problem.
According to her own analysis, the flirtatious prefatory addresses to women in the romances of popular writers such as Lyly and Greene are products of a complex marketing trend, rather than evidence of an existing market of women readers. Cultural anxieties and generalisations about women as changeable, frivolous creatures of potentially ungovernable sexual appetites, Hackett argues, "produced an inverse position whereby for an author to declare that his book was designed for the pleasure of women was in effect for him to advertise his wares to readers of both sexes as racy, lightweight, This book caused a great scandal, as its critics believed it to be a roman-a-clef attacking the character of Queen Anne.
Wroth was also the first English woman to write a significant body of secular poetry, including her sequence of sonnets, Pamphilia to Amphilathus. Only in recent years has her ground-breaking work begun to attract the attention it deserves. My latest novel Illuminations reveals the dramatic life of visionary abbess, composer, polymath and powerfrau, Hildegard von Bingen.