Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature [Hardcover]

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.1. Performing Privacy and Early Modern Women 2. Private Lament in Calvin, Knox, and Anne Lock 3. Privacy and Gender in Household Orders 4. Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well: Mastery and Publicity 5. Marriage and Private Lament in Mary Wroth's Urania 6. Interest and Retirement in Aphra Behn's Odes 7. Epilogue: Performing Privacy on FacebookPerforming 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, Trulls 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)

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.