Renaissance Fantasies : The Gendering of Aesthetics in Early Modern Fiction

Explores why some early modern writers put their masculine literary authority at risk by writing from the perspective of femininity and effeminacy. The text argues that such work promoted alternatives to the dominant patriarchal aesthetics by celebrating unruly female and effeminate male bodies.

Renaissance Fantasies is the first full-length study to explore why a number of early modern writers put their masculine literary authority at risk by writing from the perspective of femininity and effeminacy. Prendergast argues that fictions like Boccaccio's Decameron, Etienne Pasquier's Monophile, Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, and Shakespeare's As You Like It promote an alternative to the dominant, patriarchal aesthetics by celebrating unruly female and effeminate male bodies. While current studies focus on the implications of writing from the perspective of the marginalized, Predergast's wide-ranging investigation of polemical treatises, lyrics, prose fiction, and drama demonstrates how cultural constructions of gender reflect and refract aesthetic crises of the early modern period. She establishes how, during the early modern period, writers metaphorically associated didactic literature (like the epic) with masculinity and fantastical or pleasurable literature (like lyric or drama) with femininity or effeminacy.