The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama

This book constitutes a new direction for feminist studies in English Renaissance drama. While feminist scholars have long celebrated heroic females in comedies, many have overlooked female tragic heroism, reading it instead as evidence of pervasive misogyny on the part of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Displacing prevailing arguments of victim feminism, the contributors to this volume engage a wide range of feminist theories, and argue that female protagonists in tragedies - Jocasta, Juliet, Cleopatra, Mariam, Webster's Duchess and White Devil, among others - are heroic in precisely the same ways as their more notorious masculine counterparts.

Author: N. Liebler
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 07/15/2002
Pages: 242
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.52h x 5.82w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780312220594

About the Author
Naomi Conn Liebler is Professor of English and Distinguished Scholar at Montclair State University. She is author of Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre.