Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Early Modern Cultural Studies)

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WINNER OF THE 2009 NWSA SARA A. WHALEY BOOK AWARD!!xA0;This enlightening book investigates literaturex2019;s engagement with the social and gendered conflicts of early modern England by examining the narratives that seventeenth-century dramatists and women writers created to describe the lives of working women. Analyzing texts by such authors as William Shakespeare, Hannah Woolley, Thomas Heywood, Anne Clifford, and others, Dowd considers several types of workx2014;including service, wetnursing, and houseworkx2014;that changed significantly during the seventeenth century, generating new literary formulations of womenx2019;s economic, political, and religious authority.xA0; These narratives served a crucial social function, namely to construe and define the limits of female subjectivity within a shifting and contested labor economy.xA0; This original study attests not only to the social significance of womenx2019;s work during this period, but also more broadly to the dynamic force of fictional narrative in early modern England.

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Michelle M. Dowd is Associate Professor & Director of Graduate Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.xA0; She is the co-editor of Genre and Womenx2019;s Life Writing in Early Modern England (2007) and has published numerous essays on early modern drama and womenx2019;s writing.xA0; xA0;