The prodigious muse : women's writing in counter-reformation Italy / Virginia Cox.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cox, Virginia.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Italian literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

Italian literature.

Women and literature--Italy--History.

Women and literature.

History.

Italian literature--Women authors.

Italy.

Physical Description:

xxiv, 439 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.

Summary:

Expanding on a chapter from her 2008 study Women's Writing in Italy, 1400-1650, Cox (Italian, New York U.) presents a comprehensive survey of the literary production of Italian women in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, describing it as a remarkable period in terms of the quantity and range of output. She advances some key arguments about women's writing during this period, including that the Counter-Reformation counter-intuitively opened up cultural opportunities for women's writing, that the new tradition of vernacular religious literature offered women a more attractive and gender-egalitarian environment for writing, and that religious writing has to be understood as existing in a dialectic with secular literature and not (as modern habits of criticism tend to suggest) in a separate world. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781421400327

1421400324

OCLC:

688559457