Download or read book The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays written by Margaret Cavendish Duchess of Newcastle and published by . This book was released on 1999-06-18 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673), until recently remembered more as a flamboyant eccentric than as a serious writer, was in fact the most prolific, thought-provoking, and original woman writer of the Restoration. Cavendish is the author of many poems, short stories, biographies, memoirs, letters, philosophical and scientific works (including The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World, the first work of science fiction by a woman), and nineteen plays. "The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays collects four of Cavendish's dramatic works that are among the most revealing of her attitudes toward marriage and her desire for fame. Loves Adventures (1662) centers on a woman succeeding in war and diplomacy by passing as a man. Similarly, the heroine of Bell in Campo (1662) rescues her husband at the head of an army of women in this tale of a marriage of near equals. The Convent of Pleasure (1668) proposes a separatist community of women and has received attention for its suggestion of lesbian sexuality. The Bridals (1662), a more typical restoration comedy satirizing marriage, rounds out the collection. Edited with notes and annotation by Anne Shaver, "The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays also contains a timeline, biography and bibliography of the Duchess, an appreciation of Cavendish's life and work, and a bibliography of critical essays. Also included are all of Cavendish's epistles To the Reader as well as Other Preliminary Matter from Playes (1662), and Cavendish's original preface to Plays Never Before Printed (1668). A valuable collection from an extraordinary writer, "The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays raises important issues about women and gender.

Download or read book The Convent of Pleasure written by Margaret Cavendish and published by Mint Editions. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Convent of Pleasure (1868) is a closet drama by Margaret Cavendish. Intended for private performance rather than the stage, The Convent of Pleasure is a comedy that critiques the institution of marriage and explores the possibility of lesbian desire in a patriarchal society. Published under the author's own name--a rare feat for a woman of her time--The Convent of Pleasure is a groundbreaking work of queer utopian literature that continues to inform and inspire artists and critics alike. "Put the case I should Marry the best of Men, if any best there be; yet would a Marry'd life have more crosses and sorrows then pleasure, freedom, or hapiness: nay Marriage to those that are virtuous is a greater restraint then a Monastery." Tired of the ways of men, Lady Happy encourages her friends to join an experimental cloister devoted to feminine autonomy, friendship, and desire. Despite opposition from angry Monsieurs and the skeptical Madam Mediator, the woman forge a tight-knit group and seem prepared to defy the institution of marriage while pursuing romantic relationships with their fellow women. Before long, a mysterious Princess seeks entry to the convent. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

Download or read book The Female Academy written by Margaret Cavendish and published by . This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Margaret Cavendish published her first collection of dramatic work in 1662, she was keenly aware that none of her comedies or tragedies was unlikely to be acted, at least in her lifetime--but that did not deter her. "To those that do delight in scenes and wit / I dedicate my book," she writes at the beginning of the volume entitled, simply, "Plays." As for the hard reality that her plays were not to be produced? She has an answer for that as well: "For all the time my plays a-making were, / My brain the stage, my thoughts were acting there." "The Female Academy," the last play in her 1662 collection, opens with a fait accompli-a group of "old matrons" has established an educational institution devoted exclusively to the education of young women, "a house wherein a company of young ladies are instructed . . . to speak wittily and rationally, . . . to behave themselves handsomely, and to live virtuously." In this play, Cavendish presents the Female Academy as an institution created by women, inhabited solely by women, and operated for the benefit of women. The play also allows us to see the reactions of men, excluded from the Female Academy. Instead of ignoring the school, or wishing its young pupils well in their educational pursuits, men can't stay away-they hang around and spy on what's going on through "a large open grate" that allows them to hear the lectures being given inside. The play alternates scenes between the young women inside the Female Academy and the increasingly frustrated men in the outside world. This new edition, designed for classroom use, provides an ample introduction to Cavendish and her work, a carefully modernized text, with helpful glosses and notes, and a useful bibliography with references for further reading.

Download or read book Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Works written by Vanessa L. Rapatz and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Works attends to the religious, social, and material changes in England during the century following the Reformation, specifically examining how the English came to terms with the meanings of convents and novices even after they disappeared from the physical and social landscape. In five chapters, it traces convents and novices across a range of dramatic texts that refuse easy generic classification: problem plays such as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; Marlowe's comic tragedy The Jew of Malta; Margaret Cavendish's closet dramas The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious; Aphra Behn's Restoration comedy The Rover; and seventeenth-century dialogues that include both a Catholic treatise promoting women's entrance into European convents and a proto-pornographic exposé of such convents. Convents, novices, and problem plays emerge as parallel sites of ambiguity that reflect the social, political, and religious uncertainties England faced after the Reformation.

Download or read book Paper Bodies written by Margaret Cavendish and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2000-01-20 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Margaret Cavendish was one of the most subversive and entertaining writers of the seventeenth century. She invented new genres, challenged gender roles, and critiqued the new science as well as the mores of society. “Paper Bodies” was the wonderful phrase she used to described her manuscripts, which she hoped would continue to make “a great Blazing Light” after her death. There are connections here to Cavendish’s most famous work, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666), a unique tale of a woman travelling through the north pole to a strange new world. In addition to The Blazing World, this volume includes Cavendish’s brief autobiography, A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life (1667), her play The Convent of Pleasure, and selections from her Sociable Letters, her poetry, and her critical writings. A variety of background documents by other seventeenth-century writers helps to set her work in context for the modern reader.

Download or read book Lace written by Shirley Conran and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-11-06 with total page 718 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Which one of you bitches is my mother?" Four elegant, successful, and sophisticated women in their forties are called to New York's Pierre Hotel to meet Lili -- a beautiful, young, and notoriously temperamental Hollywood movie star. None of the women knows exactly why she is there; each has a reason to hate Lili and each of them is astonished to see the others. They are old friends who share a guilty secret and who have for years been doing their best to keep that secret quiet. Their lives are changed forever, however, when Lili suddenly confronts them. When the women refuse to answer her, Lili proceeds to travel around the world through the playgrounds of the rich and famous, seeking to answer the question that has obsessed and almost destroyed her. From Paris to London, from the boardroom to the bedroom, Lace takes the reader into the rarified world of five unforgettable women who are as beautiful, as complex and as strong as...lace.

Download or read book Cavendish and Shakespeare written by Katherine Romack and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2006 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections explores the relationship between the plays of Shakespeare and the writings of Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673). The essays contained in this volume fit together as studies of various sorts of influence, both literary and historical, setting Cavendish's appropriation of Shakespearean characters and plot structures within the context of the English Civil Wars and the Fronde.The essays trace Shakespeare's influence on Cavendish and explore the political implications of Cavendish's contribution to Shakespeare's reputation.

Download or read book Three Seventeenth Century Plays on Women and Performance written by Hero Chalmers and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-19 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a ground-breaking edition of three seventeenth-century plays that all engage in diverse and exciting ways with questions of gender and performance. The collection, edited by three pioneering scholars of elite female culture and early modern drama, makes the texts of three much-discussed plays - John Fletcher's The Wild-Goose Chase, James Shirley's The Bird in a Cage and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure - available together in a full scholarly edition for the first time.The Wild Goose Chase (1621) and The Bird in a Cage (1633) were both performed in the commercial London theatres in the Jacobean and Caroline periods respectively. The Convent of Pleasure (1668) is a so-called 'closet' drama, designed primarily for reading but drawing on a tradition of aristocratic theatricals. In a wide-ranging co-authored introduction to the volume, the editors explore the concerns of these playtexts in relation to contemporary debates surrounding popular festivity and anti-theatricalism, as well as the agency of elite female culture in the Stuart period and the emergence of the professional female actor in the Restoration.The volume will be an invaluable teaching and research tool for students and scholars of early modern drama, women's writing and performance studies more generally, as well as providing a rich sourcebook for the reader interested in seventeenth-century theatrical culture.

Download or read book The Blazing World Illustrated written by Margaret Cavendish and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Blazing World, is a 1666 work of prose fiction by the English writer Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. Feminist critic Dale Spender calls it a forerunner ofScience Fiction-General. It can also be read as a utopian work

Download or read book Tartuffe and Other Plays written by Jean-Baptiste Moliere and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-07-07 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seven plays by the genius of French theater. Including The Ridiculous Precieuses, The School for Husbands, The School for Wives, Don Juan, The Versailles Impromptu, and The Critique of the School for Wives, this collection showcases the talent of perhaps the greatest and best-loved French playwright. Translated and with an Introduction by Donald M. Frame With a Foreword by Virginia Scott And a New Afterword by Charles Newell

Download or read book Nuns Behaving Badly written by Craig A. Monson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witchcraft. Arson. Going AWOL. Some nuns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy strayed far from the paradigms of monastic life. Cloistered in convents, subjected to stifling hierarchy, repressed, and occasionally persecuted by their male superiors, these women circumvented authority in sometimes extraordinary ways. But tales of their transgressions have long been buried in the Vatican Secret Archive. That is, until now. In Nuns Behaving Badly, Craig A. Monson resurrects forgotten tales and restores to life the long-silent voices of these cloistered heroines. Here we meet nuns who dared speak out about physical assault and sexual impropriety (some real, some imagined). Others were only guilty of misjudgment or defacing valuable artwork that offended their sensibilities. But what unites the women and their stories is the challenges they faced: these were women trying to find their way within the Catholicism of their day and through the strict limits it imposed on them. Monson introduces us to women who were occasionally desperate to flee cloistered life, as when an entire community conspired to torch their convent and be set free. But more often, he shows us nuns just trying to live their lives. When they were crossed—by powerful priests who claimed to know what was best for them—bad behavior could escalate from mere troublemaking to open confrontation. In resurrecting these long-forgotten tales and trials, Monson also draws attention to the predicament of modern religious women, whose “misbehavior”—seeking ordination as priests or refusing to give up their endowments to pay for priestly wrongdoing in their own archdioceses—continues even today. The nuns of early modern Italy, Monson shows, set the standard for religious transgression in their own age—and beyond.

Download or read book Kant s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write An Autobiography in Essays written by Claire Messud and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A glimpse into a beloved novelist’s inner world, shaped by family, art, and literature. In her fiction, Claire Messud "has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives" (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud’s own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and literature. In twenty-six intimate, brilliant, and funny essays, Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt; and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She meditates on contemporary classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, and Valeria Luiselli; examines three facets of Albert Camus and The Stranger; and tours her favorite paintings at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In the luminous title essay, she explores her drive to write, born of the magic of sharing language and the transformative powers of “a single successful sentence.” Together, these essays show the inner workings of a dazzling literary mind. Crafting a vivid portrait of a life in celebration of the power of literature, Messud proves once again "an absolute master storyteller" (Rebecca Carroll, Los Angeles Times).

Download or read book The Art of Joy written by Goliarda Sapienza and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-07-30 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tumultuous twentieth century, told through the life of a single extraordinary woman Rejected by a series of publishers, abandoned in a chest for twenty years, Goliarda Sapienza's masterpiece, The Art of Joy, survived a turbulent path to publication. It wasn't until 2005, when it was released in France, that this novel received the recognition it deserves. At last, Sapienza's remarkable book is available in English, in a brilliant translation by Anne Milano Appel and with an illuminating introduction by Angelo Pellegrino. The Art of Joy centers on Modesta, a Sicilian woman born on January 1, 1900, whose strength and character are an affront to conventional morality. Impoverished as a child, Modesta believes she is destined for a better life. She is able, through grace and intelligence, to secure marriage to an aristocrat—without compromising her own deeply felt values. Friend, mother, lover—Modesta revels in upsetting the rules of her fascist, patriarchal society. This is the history of the twentieth century, transfigured by the perspective of one extraordinary woman. Sapienza, an intriguing figure in her own right—her father homeschooled her so she wouldn't be exposed to fascist influences—was a respected actress and writer who drew on her own struggles to craft this powerful epic. A fictionalized memoir, a book of romance and adventure, a feminist text, a bildungsroman—this novel is ultimately undefinable but deeply necessary; its genius will leave readers breathless.

Download or read book The Blazing World and Other Writings written by Margaret Cavendish and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 1994-03-31 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious, Margaret Cavendish was one of the seventeenth century's most striking figures: a woman who ventured into the male spheres of politics, science, philosophy and literature. The Blazing World is a highly original work: part Utopian fiction, part feminist text, it tells of a lady shipwrecked on the Blazing World where she is made Empress and uses her power to ensure that it is free of war, religious division and unfair sexual discrimination. This volume also includes The Contract, a romance in which love and law work harmoniously together, and Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, which explores the power and freedom a woman can achieve in the disguise of a man.

Download or read book Mad Madge written by Katie Whitaker and published by . This book was released on 2002-08-21 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The engrossing life story of Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle--the seventeenth-century Englishwoman who was famous, and infamous, for daring to pursue a career as a published writer

Download or read book Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis written by Lia Litosseliti and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-05-31 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender and discourse interface in many more epistemological sites than can be represented in one collection. Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis therefore focuses on a principled diversity of key sites within four broad areas: the media, sexuality, education and parenthood. The different chapters together illustrate how taking a discourse perspective facilitates understanding of the complex and subtle ways in which gender is represented, constructed and contested through language. The book engages critically with long-running and on-going debates, but also reflects and develops current understandings of gender, identity and discourse, particularly the shift from 'gender differences' to the discoursal shaping of gender. Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis thus offers not only insights and methodologies of new empirical studies but also careful theorisations, in particular of discourse, text, identity and gender. The collection is a valuable resource for researchers, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates working in the area of gender and discourse.

Download or read book Traditional Chinese Plays Ss lang visits his mother Ss lang t an mu The butterfly dream Hu tieh m ng written by Adolphe Clarence Scott and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world of traditional Chinese drama can be at once fascinating and bewildering to the uninitiated Western observer. Attuned to his own dramatic conventions, he is hard put to apprehend the delicate fusion of poetry, music, and subtle gesture which is the essence of Chinese theatre. Because of these difficulties, the task of translating traditional Chinese drama must go far beyond the conventional literary treatment and evoke the entire world of stagecraft and directing.