Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature

Bernadette Andrea
Paperback, 196 pages
9780521121767

In this innovative study, Bernadette Andrea focuses on the contributions of women and their writings in the early modern cultural encounters between England and the Islamic world. She examines previously neglected material, such as the diplomatic correspondence between Queen Elizabeth I and the Ottoman Queen Mother Safiye at the end of the sixteenth century, and resituates canonical accounts, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's travelogue of the Ottoman empire at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Her study advances our understanding of how women negotiated conflicting discourses of gender, orientalism, and imperialism at a time when the Ottoman empire was hugely powerful and England was still a marginal nation with limited global influence. This book is a significant contribution to critical and theoretical debates in literary and cultural, postcolonial, women's, and Middle Eastern studies.

Contents:
Introduction: 'the borrowed veil': reassessing gender studies of early modern England and Islam
1. Early modern Queens and Anglo-Ottoman trade
2. The imaginary geographies of Mary Wroth's Urania
3. Early Quaker women, the missionary position, and Mediterraneanism
4. The female wits and the genealogy of feminist Orientalism
5. The scandal of polygamy in Delarivier Manley's Roman à Clef
Coda: Arab women revisit Mary Wortley Montagu's hammam.