Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century

Throughout her book, Cooper implies that romance has always been a genre to pick up the changes and resonances of the moment that produced it.The changes, Cooper shows, were refl ected both in printed and manuscript romances.(One of the many values of this book is that it takes into account, albeit selectively, manuscript romance, which few critics have examined thus far.)Yet culture and history are only discreetly invoked.Cooper's book is a sound analysis of the literariness of romance, of the ways romance signifi es, means, and works as a literary structure, not a mirror of, or an agent solely within, material cultural production.Her encyclopedic approach to the history of the genre and the catalogue-like exhaustiveness of the memes that constitute romance represent a good example of British empirical scholarship in literary studies and also make this book an important resource for anyone wishing to grasp what the early modern romance was about and how it was structured.Fellows' and Moore's editions expand the canon of Renaissance literature and Cooper's book will change what we know about romances and how we read them.All three books will be of use to scholars working on romances, to students encountering them for the fi rst time, as well as to critics of the early modern period looking for new topics to quibble with

Art · Dissent · Literature · Political science · Politics · Public sphere · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity