Issued as part of book collections on Project MUSE.
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 204-219) and index.
Contents
'A wentche, a gyrle, a damsell' : defining early modern girlhood -- Roaring girls and unruly women : producing femininities -- Female infants and the engendering of humanity -- Where are the girls in English renaissance drama? -- Voicing girlhood : women's life writing and narratives of childhood -- Epilogue : mass-produced languages and the end of touristic choices.
Access
Open Access Unrestricted online access
Summary
The first sustained study of girls and girlhood in early modern literature and culture. Jennifer Higginbotham makes a persuasive case for a paradigm shift in our current conceptions of the early modern sex-gender system. She challenges the widespread assumption that the category of the 'girl' played little or no role in the construction of gender in early modern English culture. And she demonstrates that girl characters appeared in a variety of texts, from female infants in Shakespeare's late romances to little children in Tudor interludes to adult 'roaring girls' in city comedies. This monograph provides the first book-length study of the way the literature and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries constructed the category of the 'girl'.
