Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene [Paperback]

... very readable, lucid, intriguing study... Spenser Newsletter

... a very thoroughgoing inventory of the cruel male fantasies and nightmares imposed on... female-gendered figures... Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

Cavanagh has managed to give an almost entirely new reading of [The Faerie Queene]; it is the first feminist rereading of the entire epic, and it reshapes the contours of the huge poem in often startling and remarkable ways. Maureen Quilligan, University of Pennsylvania

SHEILA T. CAVANAGH is Assistant Professor of English and associated faculty in Women's Studies at Emory University.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Manliness of Virtue
1. Beauties Chace: Male Responses to Women in Faeryland
2. Nightmares of Desire
3. The Importance of Being Fairest: Kidnapping and Courtship in Faeryland
4. Fayre of face...though meane her lot: The Worth of Virtue
5. Like an Enraged Cow: Britomart among the Chased and the unchaste
Notes
Works Cited
Index