Gendered Violence and Violent Genders on the Premodern Stage - Melissa Ridley Elmes;Matthew Charles Carter

This interdisciplinary and transhistorical collection of essays examines the subject of violence and gender in dramatic works and performances from the premodern period.

The essays feature approaches grounded in intersectional literary, performance, feminist, masculinity, queer, and violence studies. The collection as a whole participates in current field concerns regarding disciplinarity and periodization, with particular attention to how the false divisions of periodization too often flatten or otherwise obfuscate important ongoing trends and social constructions and contexts that influence performance activity in living communities.

Through an approach that includes essays crossing methodologies and the artificial boundaries of periodization, as well as essays that engage with similar concepts in different genres and across national divides in an era in which France and England were decidedly influencing one another, this book provides a single-volume starting point for (re)considering periodization, genre, and the representation of gender according to social contexts.

These investigations offer new approaches to premodern drama and gender studies, and situate well-known texts alongside non-canonical counterparts.