Genre and Women's Life Writing in Early Modern England

Michelle M. Dowd is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, USA. Julie A. Eckerle is Assistant Professor of English, University of Minnesota, Morris, USA

'...makes an important contribution to the study of early modern women by its distinctive focus on generic innovation, women’s life writings, and the construction of the female self. The historicist approach of the volume is original and compelling, and the essays make a major contribution to gender studies by demonstrating how women’s identities are formed in rich and complex texts and contexts. The volume is not only theoretically astute, but meticulous throughout in its use of primary and secondary sources.' Laura Knoppers, Penn State University, USA ’... this is indeed a useful collection that expands our understanding both of literary genres and of women's rhetorical self presentations in the early modern period.’ Renaissance Quarterly

• Acknowledgments; Chapter 1 Introduction, Michelle M. Dowd, Julie A. Eckerle; Chapter 2 “Free and Easy as ones discourse”?: Genre and Self-Expression in the Poems and Letters of Early Modern Englishwomen, Helen Wilcox; Chapter 3 Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture and Early Modern Women’s Life Writing, Margaret J.M. Ezell; Chapter 4 “Many hands hands”: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women’s Recipe Books, Catherine Field; Chapter 5 Serial Identity: History, Gender, and Form in the Diary Writing of Lady Anne Clifford, Megan Matchinske; Chapter 6 Merging the Secular and the Spiritual in Lady Anne Halkett’s Memoirs, Mary Ellen Lamb; Chapter 7 Prefacing Texts, Authorizing Authors, and Constructing Selves: The Preface as Autobiographical Space, Julie A. Eckerle; Chapter 8 Structures of Piety in Elizabeth Richardson’s Legacie, Michelle M. Dowd; Chapter 9 Intersubjectivity, Intertextuality, and Form in the Self-Writings of Margaret Cavendish, Elspeth Graham; Chapter 10 Margaret Cavendish’s Domestic Experiment, Lara Dodds; Chapter 11 “That All the World May Know”: Women’s “Defense-Narratives” and the Early Novel, Josephine Donovan;