The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama

N. Liebler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137049575
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book constitutes a new direction for feminist studies in English Renaissance drama. While feminist scholars have long celebrated heroic females in comedies, many have overlooked female tragic heroism, reading it instead as evidence of pervasive misogyny on the part of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Displacing prevailing arguments of "victim feminism, " the contributors to this volume engage a wide range of feminist theories, and argue that female protagonists in tragedies - Jocasta, Juliet, Cleopatra, Mariam, Webster's Duchess and White Devil, among others - are heroic in precisely the same ways as their more notorious masculine counterparts.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Wonder Woman, or the Female Tragic Hero
• Euripides at Gray's Inn: Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh's jocasta
• Visible Hecubas
• "Not Know Me Yet?": Looking at Cleopatra in Three Renaissance Tragedies
• The Heroic Tragedy of Cleopatra, the "Prostitute Queen"
• Female Heroism in Heywood's Tragic Farce of Adultery: A Woman Killed with Kindness
• "As If a Man Should Spit against the Wind"
• Queen of Apricots: The Duchess of Malfi, Hero of Desire
• The "Morris Witch" in The Witch of Edmonton
• Sex and the Female Tragic Hero
• Contributors
• Works Cited
• Index