Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject(Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)

Series: Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

The period from the Reformation to the English Civil War saw an evolving understanding of social identity in England. This book uses four illuminating case studies to chart a shift from mid-sixteenth-century notions of an individually generated, spiritually motivated self, to civil war perceptions of the self as a site of civil control. Each centers on the work of an early modern woman writer in t