Literary Criticism : Women Authors

The captivating biography of the French aristocrat who balanced the demands of her society with passionate affairs of the heart and a brilliant life of the mind. Although today she is best known for her fifteen-year liaison with Voltaire, Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet (1706–1749) was more than a great man’s mistress. After marrying a marquis at the age of eighteen, she proceeded to fulfill the prescribed—and delightfully frivolous—role of a French noblewoman of her time. But she also challenged it, conducting a highly visible affair with a commoner, writing philosophical works, and translating Newton’s Principia while pregnant by a younger lover. With the sweep of Galileo’s Daughter, Emilie Du Châtelet captures the charm, glamour, and brilliance of this magnetic woman. more...

Price: $16.00

Attending to the dialogue between the comic events in plays by female writers of the 18th century and the plays' more predictable comic endings illuminates the philosophical, political and legal arguements about women and marrige that fascinated the playwrights and the theatre-going public. more...

Price: $79.95

Interviews with over 30 women provide first-hand accounts of the excitement, struggles and innovations of the dynamic feminist theatre of the 1970s and 80s. A compelling combination of historical survey, critique and celebration. more...

Price: $44.95

Inventive in its approach, this study offers fresh readings of the arguments and practices of four seventeenth-century Euro-American women: Anne Bradstreet, Anne Hutchinson, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Marie de l'Incarnation. Tamara Harvey offers a new way to think of corporeality as a device in literary and religious expressions of modesty by women, and explores how these women engaged in ongoing religious, political, scientific and social debates of the time. more...

Price: $99.95

Examining how early modern women made use of formal and generic structures to constitute themselves in writing, the essays collected here interrogate the discursive contours of gendered identity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Collectively the contributors situate women's life writings within the broader textual culture of early modern England while maintaining a focus on the particular rhetorical devices and narrative structures that comprise individual texts. more...

Price: $99.95