Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama

Description

This volume of twelve original essays is the first comprehensive study of feminist issues in Restoration drama. The late seventeenth century marks a pivotal era in the history of feminism, when Renaissance assumptions about gender and patriarchy were being directly challenged. For the first time, women appeared onstage as actresses, made their presence felt as spectators and patrons, and wrote a number of the plays produced in theaters. In an unusually direct and probing way, drama of the Restoration period raised radical questions about the place of women in the family and in society, and about the essential nature of men and women. The essays examine feminist issues from a variety of historical and theoretical approaches across a spectrum of plays -- comedies, tragedies, tragicomedies, and heroic drama. By addressing the acute questions of gender raised in the drama, Broken Boundaries presents a vivid portrait of the uncertainties and changing perceptions in all areas of intellectual, political, and social life during the last decades of the seventeenth century. Title Copyright Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1 Instruments of Propagation: Plays by Women Blacker Than Hell Creates: Pix Rewrites Othello Unmanned with Thy Words: Regendering Tragedy in Manley and Trotter In the Carnival World of Adam's Garden: Roving and Rape in Behn's Rover Closure and Subversion in Behn's Comedies Lady Fulbank and the Poet's Dream in Behn 's Lucky Chance Part 2 Chased Desire: Women and Feminism in Plays by Men Tupping Your Rival's Women: Cit-Cuckolding as Class Warfare in Restoration Comedy Almahide Still Lives: Feminine Will and Identity in Dryden's Conquest of Granada Resisting a Private Tyranny in Two Humane Comedies The Way of the Word: Telling Differences in Congreve's Way of the World Part 3 The Gaze Reversed: Theory and History of Performance Rape, Voyeurism, and the Restoration Stage Reading Masks: The Actress and the Spectatrix in Restoration Shakespeare Sticks and Rags, Bodies and Brocade: Essentializing Discourses and the Late Restoration Playhouse Contributors Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W