Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation
Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation
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Summary
A study of Elizabeth I which focuses on her difficulty in building up power in a patriarchal society. The author uses literary and historical examination of three crises in her reign to trace the queen's struggle to retain control over the iconography of both her physical self and her political domain.
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Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation by Frye
Elizabeth I is perhaps the most visible woman in early modern Europe, yet little attention has been paid to what she said about the difficulties of constructing her power in a patriarchal society. This revisionist study examines her struggle for authority through the representation of her female body. Based on a variety of extant historical and literary materials, Frye's interpretation focuses on three representational crises spaced fifteen years apart: the London coronation of 1559, the Kenilworth entertainments of 1575, and the publication of The Faerie Queene in 1590. In ways which varied with social class and historical circumstance, the London merchants, the members of the Protestant faction, courtly artists, and artful courtiers all sought to stabilize their own gendered identities by constructing the queen within the "natural" definitions of the feminine as passive and weak. Elizabeth fought back, acting as a discursive agent by crossing, and thus disrupting, these definitions. She and those closely identified with her interests evolved a number of strategies through which to express her political control in terms of the ownership of her body, including her elaborate iconography and a mythic biography upon which most accounts of Elizabeth's life have been based. The more authoritative her image became, the more vigorously it was contested in a process which this study examines and consciously perpetuates.
`impressively researched.. a book with many good things in it, and the introduction especially is a lucid critique of and response to work in the field' Times Literary Supplement
Susan Frye is Professor of English at the University of Wyoming and author of Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780195113839 |
| ISBN 10 | 0195113837 |
| Title | Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation |
| Author | Frye |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press Inc |
| Year published | 1997-07-03 |
| Number of pages | 240 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |