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Amorous Hope, A Pastoral Play: A Bilingual Edition (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series #83)

Amorous Hope, A Pastoral Play: A Bilingual Edition (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series #83)

Current price: $71.94
Publication Date: February 25th, 2021
Publisher:
Iter Press
ISBN:
9781649590268
Pages:
368

Description

A seventeenth-century play showing the reality of life for women.
 
Valeria Miani’s Amorous Hope is a play of remarkable richness, subtlety, and verve. It presents a scathing exposure of society’s double-standards and it champions women’s dramatic agency by centering on the bleak reality they often faced, a reality that attempted to harm and silence its victims. The play’s salient episodes reflect realities modern women still face today.
 
Miani’s literary achievements attest to her emergence as a cultural protagonist alongside Europe’s most talented women writers, such as Isabella Andreini, and she challenged the premodern notion that a woman’s eloquence is an indication of her sexual promiscuity.
 

About the Author

Valeria Miani (1563-1620) was a Paduan playwright known for her protofeminism and verse compositions.

Alexandra Coller is associate professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at Lehman College, City University of New York. She is the author of Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy.
 

Alexandra Coller is associate professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at Lehman College, City University of New York. She is the author of Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy.
 

Praise for Amorous Hope, A Pastoral Play: A Bilingual Edition (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series #83)

“Joining recent publications of other drama by Italian women around 1600, Miani’s Amorous Hope is a work of considerable interest by a playwright only recently becoming better known after long neglect. Coller’s introduction, which makes use of excellent and up-to-date scholarship, persuasively presents Miani’s participation within a network of literati and academia members and pursues this topic of interconnections through a detailed account of her poems published in anthologies alongside the verses of others. Its discussion of the play focuses on Miani’s treatment of the main issue: male injustices to women, and the corrections or penalties delivered by the two leading female characters. As Coller points out, the lessons given by female characters are also the lessons to the audience by the playwright herself.”
— Janet L. Smarr, University of California San Diego