Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature

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University of Chicago Press, 2002 - Всего страниц: 139
For most readers and spectators, heroism takes the form of public, idealized masculinity. It calls to mind socially and morally elevated men embarking on active adventures: courageously confronting danger; valiantly rescuing the helpless; exploring and claiming unconquered terrain. But in this book, Mary Beth Rose argues that from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries, a passive, more female, but equally potent dimension of heroic identity began to dominate English culture. For both men and women, heroism came to be defined in terms of patience, as the ability to endure suffering, catastrophe, and pain.

Interweaving discourses of gender, Rose explores ways in which this heroics of endurance became the dominant model. She examines the glamorous, failed destinies of heroes in plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marlowe; Elizabeth I's creation of a heroic identity in her public speeches; the autobiographies of four ordinary women thrust into the public sphere by civil war; and the seduction of heroes into slavery in works by Milton, Aphra Behn, and Mary Astell. Ultimately, her study demonstrates the importance of the female in the creation of modern heroism, while offering a critique of both idealized action and suffering.

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The Gendering of Heroism in Marlowe Jonson and Shakespeare
1
2 Gender and the Construction of Royal Authority in the Speeches of Elizabeth I
26
Female Heroism in SeventeenthCentury Autobiography
55
Gender and the Heroics of Endurance in Miltons Samson Agonistes Aphra Behns Oroonoko and Mary Astells Some Reflections upon Marriage
85
Epilogue
113
Notes
119
Index
135
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Mary Beth Rose is a professor of English and director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is coeditor of Elizabeth I: Collected Works and the author of The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama.

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