Katherine R. Larson - Early Modern Women in Conversation. Early Modern Literature in History [2011][A]

Book Description
To converse is, in its most fundamental sense, to engage with society. The potency of conversation as an early modern social networking tool is complicated, however, both by its gendered status in the period and by its conflation of verbal and physical interaction. Conversation was an embodied act that signified social intimacy, cohabitation, and even sexual intercourse. As such, conversation posed a particular challenge for women, whose virtuous reputation was contingent on sexual and verbal self-control. Early Modern Women in Conversation considers how five women writers from the prominent Sidney and Cavendish families negotiated the gendered interrelationship between conversation and the spatial boundaries delimiting conversational encounters to create opportunities for authoritative and socially transformative utterance within their texts. Conversation emerges in this book as a powerful rhetorical and creative practice that remaps women's relationship to space and language in early modern England.

Review
'...Larson's book takes us into the virtual spaces of women's conversation..' - Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Times Literary Supplement

About the Author
KATHERINE R. LARSON is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Canada, where her research and teaching focus on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and culture, gender and language, women's writing, and music and literature. Her work has appeared in English Literary Renaissance, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, the Sidney Journal, The Journal of Popular Culture, Canadian Literature, the University of Toronto Quarterly, and Life Writing.