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MARY WROTH AND MARGARET CAVENDISH: ‘WHO THUS TO BLACKNESS RUN’ MARY WROTH AND MARGARET CAVENDISH: ‘WHO THUS TO BLACKNESS RUN’
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CAVENDISH’S IMAGINED EMPIRE CAVENDISH’S IMAGINED EMPIRE
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HESTER PULTER AND APHRA BEHN: DARK SHADOWS, FAIR PICTURES HESTER PULTER AND APHRA BEHN: DARK SHADOWS, FAIR PICTURES
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CONCLUSION CONCLUSION
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FURTHER READING FURTHER READING
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18 Romance and Race
Get accessV. M. Braganza is a PhD candidate at Harvard University who works on early modern women’s writing and book ownership, and their intersections with premodern critical race theory, genre studies, Milton, and Shakespeare. Her work has appeared in Studies in Philology, Shakespeare, English Literary Renaissance, the Early Modern Female Book Ownership Blog, and the born-digital Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Her public-facing writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books and Smithsonian Magazine. She is the lead curator for an exhibit on how British and American women authors crafted their identities through books (‘500 Years of Women Authors, Authorising Themselves’) for Harvard’s rare books and manuscripts repository, the Houghton Library; and she has also guest-curated an exhibit for the Library of Congress in the past. Her dissertation and first book project, currently in progress, explores the pervasive influence of codes and ciphers on the early modern literary imagination.
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Published:19 December 2022
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Abstract
Throughout the seventeenth century, female authors use the evolving concept of race to reshape romance’s investment in identity in search of their own. Women’s romances use perceived instabilities in racialised identities to carve out social and literary agency for female authors and subjects. However, as they craft their identities via racial metaphors and politics, instability, not identity, ultimately prevails. This chapter tracks the evolution of this process across the fictions of Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, Hester Pulter, and Aphra Behn. These writers’ literary engagements with different conceptual aspects of race transform romance from a genre centred on the discovery of identity to one which destabilises—and is destabilised by—racial and gendered identities. In this way, women’s romances do not just reflect the identity politics of emergent racialism: they are complicit in creating and encoding it. Romance ultimately helps to create the very world in which it fails.
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