Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture

How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analyzing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns--humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theater--in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject.

1. Introduction Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, Dympna Callaghan; 2. Making it new: humanism, colonialism, and the gendered body in early modern culture Denise Albanese; 3. Gendering mortality in early modern anatomies Valerie Traub; 4. Wound man: Coriolanus, gender and the theatrical construction of interiority Cynthia Marshall; 5. 'The world I have made': Margaret Cavendish, feminism, and the Blazing-World Rosemary Kegl; 6. Reading, writing, and other crimes Frances E. Dolan; 7. Culinary spaces, colonial spaces: the gendering of sugar in the seventeenth century Kim F. Hall; 8. Caliban versus Miranda: race and gender conflicts in post-colonial re-writings of The Tempest Jyotsna G. Singh; 9. Rape, repetition, and the politics of closure in A Midsummer Night's Dream Laura Levine; 10. Subjection and subjectivity: Jewish law and female autonomy in Reformation English marriage M. Lindsay Kaplan; 'Where there can be no cause of affection': redefining virgins, their desires, and their pleasures in John Lyly's Gallathea Theodora A. Jankowski; The terms of gender: 'gay' and feminist Edward II Dympna Callaghan.