The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.049  Thursday, 5 February 2015

From:        Kirilka Stavreva <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Date:         February 4, 2015 at 5:15:17 PM EST

Subject:    Book Announcement: Words Like Daggers: Violent Female Speech in Early Modern England

 

Dear colleagues,

 

I’m thrilled to announce the publication of my monograph, Words Like Daggers: Violent Female Speech in Early Modern England (Early Modern Cultural Studies), University of Nebraska Press, 2015. 

 

Publisher’s site: http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Words-Like-Daggers,676009.aspx

 

Amazon USA: http://www.amazon.com/Words-Like-Daggers-Violent-Cultural/dp/0803254881/

 

Dramatic and documentary narratives about aggressive and garrulous women often cast such women as reckless and ultimately unsuccessful usurpers of cultural authority. Contending narratives, however, sometimes within the same texts, point to the effective subversion and undoing of the normative restrictions of social and gender hierarchies. Words Like Daggers explores the scolding invectives, malevolent curses, and ecstatic prophesies of early modern women as attested to in legal documents, letters, self-narratives, popular pamphlets, ballads, and dramas of the era. Examining the framing and performance of violent female speech between the 1590s and the 1660s, Kirilka Stavreva dismantles the myth of the silent and obedient women who allegedly populated early modern England.

 

Table of Contents

 

Introduction: Bitter Words and the Tuning of Gender

1. Feminine Contentious Speech and the Religious Imagination

2. Gender and the Narratives of Scolding in the Church Courts

3. Unquiet Women on the Early Modern Stage

4. Witch-Speak in Late Elizabethan Docu-Fiction

5. Courtly Witch-Speak on the Jacobean Stage

6. Gender and Politics in Early Quaker Women's Prophetic "Cries"

Epilogue: Margaret's Bitter Words and the Voice of (Divine) Justice, or, Compulsory Listening

 

Kirilka Stavreva

Professor of English

Cornell College

Mount Vernon, IA 52314, U.S.A

 

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