Re-Shaping the Genres

How did gender relate to the most relevant questions of genre in the literature of the English Restoration? This is the underlying topic of this collection of essays. The contributors undertake the analysis of the forms, contents, and contexts of the main literary modes of the period in the works of Margaret Cavendish, Anne Killigrew, Aphra Behn, Mary Pix, Delarivier Manley, Catherine Trotter, and Jane Barker. All the essays in this book share the assumption that late seventeenth-century women writers questioned and expanded existing conventions in poetry, drama and prose fiction, and at the same time opened paths in the configuration of major kinds of literature. Attentive to the most recent approaches of literary theory and criticism, such as new historicism, cultural materialism, feminism and reader-response criticism, this book intervenes in the present re-assessment of the role played by women in late seventeenth-century literature, and claims their necessary presence in alternative versions of the canon. Generic criteria have been used for the organization of the volume, which opens with studies on lyric poetry, continues with essays on drama, and concludes with contributions on different narrative modes.