Dido′s Daughters – Literacy, Gender & Empire in Early Modern England and France: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France - Hardcover

Ferguson, Margaret W

3.6

5 ratings by Goodreads

9780226243115: Dido′s Daughters – Literacy, Gender & Empire in Early Modern England and France: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226243117 ISBN 13: 9780226243115

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2003

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Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as Margaret Ferguson reveals in "Dido's Daughters", this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The 15th through 17th centuries, she shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes of literacy toward more vernacular forms of speech and writing. Ferguson's aim in this work is twofold: to show that what counted as more valuable among these competing literacies had much to do with notions of gender, and to demonstrate how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations. Looking at writers whom she dubs the figurative daughters of the mythological figure Dido - builder of an empire that threatened to rival Rome - Ferguson traces debates about literacy and empire in the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cary and Aphra Behn, as well as male writers such as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Wyatt. The result is a study that sheds new light on the crucial roles that gender and women played in the modernization of England and France.

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Review:

"This is a book of unique vision and breadth. There are very few scholars of early modernism who possess the combination of traditional erudition and theoretical expertise that Margaret Ferguson does. The sweeping, learned analysis in Dido's Daughters will provide an entirely new perspective on the complex dynamics among gender, literacy, and modernization." - Mary Beth Rose, author of Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature

About the Author:

Margaret W. Ferguson is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry and coeditor of a number of books, most recently The Norton Anthology of Poetry, fourth edition.

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