Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy - Women's Desire, Deception, and Agency

Coyness and Crime examines the extraordinary focus on feminine coyness in forty English comedies by ten diverse playwrights of the late seventeenth-century. In contexts ranging from reaffirmations of church and king to emerging interests in liberty and novelty, these plays consistently reveal women caught in an ironic and nearly intractable convergence of objectification and culpability that allows them little innocent sexual agency; this is both the source and the legacy of coyness in Restoration comedy.

List of contents

Chapter 1 Coyness, Conduct, and She Would if She Could Chapter 2 Feminine Illusion and Masculine Violence in Wycherley's Comedies Chapter 3 Unruly Women and Patriarchal Control in Dryden's The Kind Keeper Chapter 4 Coyness, Love, and Money in Behn's Comedies Chapter 5 Liberty and Coyness in Shadwell's Comedies Chapter 6 Novelty and Coyness in Congreve and Trotter Chapter 7 Marriage, Virtue, and Coyness in Southerne, Vanbrugh, and Pix

About the author

Peggy Thompson has written on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Studies in Philology; SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900; Restoration: Studies in Literary Culture, 1660-1700; Eighteenth-Century Fiction and elsewhere. She is the Ellen Douglass Leyburn Professor of English at Agnes Scott College.

Product details

• Authors: Peggy Thompson
• Publisher: University Press Copublishing Division
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.12.2019
• EAN: 9781611483727
• ISBN: 978-1-61148-372-7
• No. of pages: 202
• Dimensions: 164 mm x 243 mm x 28 mm
• Weight: 440 g
• Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture 1650-1850; Transits: Lit, Thought & C; Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture; Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850; Transits: Literature, Thought; Transits: Lit, Thought & C
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies