Women and romance fiction in the English Renaissance

"This book offers an original study of lyric form and social custom in the Elizabethan age. Ilona Bell explores the tendency of Elizabethan love poems not only to represent an amorous thought, but to conduct the courtship itself. Where recent studies have focused on courtship, patronage and preferment at court, her focus is on love poetry, amorous courtship, and relations between Elizabethan men and women. The book examines the ways in which the tropes and rhetoric of love poetry were used to court Elizabethan women (not only at court and in the great houses, but in society at large) and how the women responded to being wooed, in prose, poetry and speech. Bringing together canonical male poets and recently discovered women writers, Ilona Bell investigates a range of texts addressed to, written by, read, heard or transformed by Elizabethan women, and charts the beginnings of a female lyric tradition."--BOOK JACKET.

First sentence: Various kinds of evidence support the view of Louis Wright and others that the commercial success of Renaissance romances was attributable to a new female readership.

Year

2000

Language

English

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Editions

3

Pages

243

ISBN

9780521031547

Data source: Wikidata