Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Performing Privacy and Early Modern Women

   • Mary E. Trull

   Pages 1-19

3. Private Lament in Calvin, Knox, and Anne Lock

   • Mary E. Trull

   Pages 20-51

4. Privacy and Gender in Household Orders

   • Mary E. Trull

   Pages 52-83

5. Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well: Mastery and Publicity

   • Mary E. Trull

   Pages 84-111

6. Marriage and Private Lament in Mary Wroth’s Urania

   • Mary E. Trull

   Pages 112-144

7. Interest and Retirement in Aphra Behn’s Odes

   • Mary E. Trull

   Pages 145-171

8. Epilogue: Performing Privacy on Facebook

   • Mary E. Trull

   Pages 172-177

9. Back Matter

   Pages 178-232

   PDF

This book argues that the early modern public/private boundary was surprisingly dynamic and flexible in early modern literature, drawing upon authors including Shakespeare, Anne Lock, Mary Wroth, and Aphra Behn, and genres including lyric poetry, drama, prose fiction, and household orders. An epilogue discusses postmodern privacy in digital media.

• Early Modern Literature
• English literature
• fiction
• gender
• lyric
• poetry
• prose
• William Shakespeare
• women
• British and Irish Literature

“Performing Privacy is a carefully crafted, meticulously researched, scholarly study that cogently demonstrates the experimental formal, generic, and rhetorical strategies that early modern writers employed to trouble the formal and generic conventions of the publicity / privacy opposition. Contesting conventional approaches to the topic, Trull’s study opens a capacious window on early modern constructions of privacy and gender, usefully prompting us to rethink the relationships among gender, genre, publicity, privacy, and the performance of subjectivity.” (Mark Albert Johnston, Renaissance and Reformation, Vol. 38 (3), 2015)

• St. Olaf College, USA

  Mary E. Trull

Mary Trull is an Associate Professor of English at St. Olaf College, USA. Her research on Shakespeare and early modern women writers has been published in essay collections and journals including ELR: English Literary Renaissance and Religion and Literature.

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