Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589
- Author / Editor
- Summit, Jennifer.
Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589
- Published
- Chicago and London : University of Chicago Press, 2000.
- Physical Description
- x, 274 pp. : 10 b&w illus.
- Description
- Historicizing the "commonplace" conception that women writers stand in opposition to literary tradition, Summit assesses how the conception itself "dialectically fashioned both 'the woman writer' and 'English literature' in the medieval and early modern periods." In Chaucer, "'the lost woman writer' embodies the disjunction between vernacular writing and the classical canon." Women writers "embody textual loss and cultural instability" in HF, Anel, TC, and LGW, and through them Chaucer "explores the problems of writing outside authoritarian models of literary tradition."
- For later writers and critics (Christine de Pizan, Margery Kempe, Anne Askew, Elizabeth I, John Bale, Thomas Bentley, George Puttenham), the figure of the female writer serves similar functions and thereby "becomes central to English literature's very invention," especially under Elizabeth I.
- Chaucer Subjects
- House of Fame
- Anelida and Arcite
- Troilus and Criseyde
- Legend of Good Women