Warrior Women and Popular Balladry 1650-1850

by Dianne Dugaw

Overview

Dugaw's book documents the flourishing of the female warrior heroine in lower-class popular songs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In well over one hundred ballads during this period, the heroine masquerades as a man, going to war for love and glory. The author examines the ballads, their composition, sale and performance, and relates the warrior women to a wide range of contemporary contexts. These include everyday life for the lower-class population of the period (and especially for women), a wide array of literary forms using the motif of disguised women and raising issues relating to gender and masquerading, and the Western heroic ideal with its sexual and martial implications. This original study makes valuable connections between popular and polite literary forms, too often segregated in academic studies. From a stimulating feminist perspective, Dugaw addresses some timely and contentious issues in this study of refreshingly new source material.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521372541
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/02/1989
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought , #4
Pages:	250
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; List of figures; Prologue; Part I. The Ballads and Their Heroine: 1. Popular Balladry, Mary Ambree, and the Beginnings of the Female Warrior Motif, 1600–1650; 2. The Fashion for Female Warrior Ballads: New 'Hits' and Old Favourites, 1650–1800; 3. The Museum Life of Mary Ambree and the Decline of the Female Warrior, 1800 to the Present; 4. The Female Warrior Motif as an Idea; Part II. Reading The Female Warrior: 5. The Female Warrior and Everyday Life in the Early Modern World; 6. The Female Warrior and the Construction of Gender; 7. Hic-Mulier: Imaginative Preoccupation and Genotype for the Female Warrior; 8. The Female Warrior, Gay's Polly, and the Heroic Ideal; Epilogue; Notes; Appendix; Selected bibliography.

Editorial Reviews

"Women Warriors raises urgent and important questions about treatments of gender in the eighteenth century, about the relation between historical conditions and cultural works, and, particularly, about the interaction between the conventional and referential dimensions of those works—including the ways that the conventions of traditional forms may themselves become one of the conditions of life." Modern Philology

"Dugaw's book makes these points forcefully and thoroughly....The writing is literate and lively, and the documentation and contextual learning have the impressive thoroughness that is something of a hallmark of scholarship grounded in a UCLA dissertation." Mark Booth, The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography

From the Publisher

A reference that examines the various vocations of the pilgrims in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Each expert chapter describes a particular pilgrim's specific function in 14th-century England. The emphasis is on the historical position of the various vocations foreworded in the "General Prologue." Other considerations are the link between each pilgrim's profession and the content or direction of his or her tale; the link between the profession and tale in terms of the pilgrim's character as defined in the "General Prologue"; and the ways in which the pilgrim's character goes beyond what might normally be expected from a member of such a group. Each chapter concludes with a bibliography of recent critical works relative to that pilgrim. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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