This course takes seriously the socio-economic, cultural, religious and aesthetic restrictions placed on early modern women, and the ways in which early modern women exercised considerable authorial agency in the aesthetic-fashioning of literary tropes and forms of thought. Often reforming, reinventing, revising and re-imagining literary, scientific, and philosophical outlooks, these women fostered and created forms of resistance, subversion and cultural influence from within and without their historically specific cultural norms. This course recovers works that were frequently written out of the study of the Renaissance during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to grapple with the imaginative, scientific and philosophical voices of women writing under the constraints of their time. |