Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature

Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature demonstrates that early modern women''s rhetorical manipulations of privacy violate the public/private opposition and experiment with form and genre in ways that shaped the early modern discourse on privacy. This book reveals how authors inventively disrupt conventions about women''s privacy and its proper limits in genres from household orders to fiction, poetry, and drama. Mary Trull traces the construction of privacy in Anne Lock''s ''The Meditation of a Penitent Sinner,'' Shakespeare''s All''s Well That Ends Well, Mary Wroth''s Urania, and Aphra Behn''s fiction and lyric poetry. The book explores changing views of privacy from the mid-sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, from nostalgically evoked feudalism to emergent signs of distinctively modern forms of privacy linked to the nuclear family and the economic concept of private interest. A conclusion links early modern privacy to digital media and Facebook.