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

A feminist rereading of a key work in the English Renaissance canon, Spenser's The Faerie Queene.

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