How did gender relate to the most relevant questions of genre in the literature of the English
Restoration? This is the underlying topic of this collection of essays. The contributors
undertake the analysis of the forms contents and contexts of the main literary modes of the
period in the works of Margaret Cavendish Anne Killigrew Aphra Behn Mary Pix Delarivier
Manley Catherine Trotter and Jane Barker. All the essays in this book share the assumption
that late seventeenth-century women writers questioned and expanded existing conventions in
poetry drama and prose fiction and at the same time opened paths in the configuration of
major kinds of literature. Attentive to the most recent approaches of literary theory and
criticism such as new historicism cultural materialism feminism and reader-response
criticism this book intervenes in the present re-assessment of the role played by women in
late seventeenth-century literature and claims their necessary presence in alternative
versions of the canon. Generic criteria have been used for the organization of the volume
which opens with studies on lyric poetry continues with essays on drama and concludes with
contributions on different narrative modes.
