Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght

The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght

Speght, Rachel
Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer

Hardcover

Series: Women Writers in English 1350-1850

Literary CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0195086147
ISBN13: 9780195086140
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Jun 20 1996
Pages: 144
Weight: 0.74
Height: 0.61 Width: 5.82 Depth: 8.80
Language: English
Rachel Speght was the first Englishwoman to identify herself, unmistakably and by name, as a polemicist and critic of contemporary gender ideology. This edition includes her polemical foray into the Jacobean gender wars and her collected poems. Speght's tract, A Mouzzell for Melastomus (1617), is at once a spirited answer to Joseph Swetnam's attack on women and a serious effort to stake women's claim to the prevailing Protestant discourse of biblical exegesis. In other words, she tried to yield a more expansive and more equitable concept of gender. Speght's volume of poems, Moralities Memorandum with a Dream Prefixed (1621)--printed, in part, to counter charges that her prose was actually her father's-- includes a long memento mori meditation and an allegorical dream vision that recounts her own rapturous encounter with learning. Both texts vigorously defend women's education and encourage women's talents. This volume should find a ready audience among scholars and students of early seventeenth-century literature, history, and religion, as well as among those in women's studies.

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