Women's Wit on the Early Modern Stage

AvBeth Cortese

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

Del i serien EARLY MODERN FEMINISMS

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Beskrivning

Women's Wit on the Early Modern Stage explores the overlooked, gendered challenge posed by heroines and villainesses in comedies, tragedies, and tragicomedies through who displayed their wit through repartee, plotting, and disguise, combining verbal skill with physical action to produce a feminized perspective. The chapters showcase the portrayal of women's wit in the works of Frances Boothby, Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Polwhele, Mary Pix, Catharine Trotter, Delarivier Manley, and Susanna Centlivre, in which female characters criticize authority and address female spectators in the theater, including them as part of an emerging critical discourse on the public stage. As the first-ever scholarly monograph about women's wit in drama before the twentieth century, this book draws attention to the cultural and social role that wit played in the public sphere as a mode of critique, empowerment, and play for women both on and offstage.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2026-10-13
Mått:156 x 235 x undefined mm
Vikt:454 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Serie:EARLY MODERN FEMINISMS
Antal sidor:234
Förlag:University of Delaware Press
ISBN:9781644534380

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Mer om författaren

Beth Rebecca Cortese is an Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Iceland, focusing on the Restoration and eighteenth century. She has been published in Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research journal, Law and Literature, and in the Nordic Journal of Renaissance Studies, and is preparing a new edition of William Wycherley's The Country Wife.

Recensioner i media

"A path-breaking investigation of how women's wit was represented onstage by actresses and female dramatists [. . .] Beth Cortese's analysis is invaluable for both scholars and practitioners." - Marion Wynne-Davies, author of Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English Renaissance: Relative Values (2007))

Innehållsförteckning

Acknowledgments Introduction: Setting the Scene of Women's Wit Onstage 1. Skeptical Subjects: Voicing Autonomy Through the Comic Heroine's Wit 2. Sisters "Shifting" for Themselves: Wit in Action 3. Witty Villainesses on the Tragic Stage: Rereading Women's Revenge Through Wit 4. The Witty Women of She-Tragedy: Upstaging Authority Through Visual Dissimilitude 5. Wit "shall assist thee [. . .] with my help": Women's Collaborative Wit Onstage Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index