Elizabeth I

""Bell is the only scholar out there who is able to tackle the complexities of Elizabeth's written and reported spoken discourse with the full literary attention that it deserves. Once published, this pathbreaking book will show an entire generation of scholars how to integrate Elizabeth Tudor the writer into our understanding of rhetoric, poetics, and language in the Elizabethan age. The fruits of this heightened attention to the rhetoricity and literariness of Elizabeth's self-presentation are clear. Bell has the potential to change the way we think about Elizabeth's place in the histories of gender, politics, religions, diplomacy--ultimately in history itself."--John Watkins, Professor of English, University of Minnesota" "This book focuses on the ways in which Elizabeth represented herself in her own words, especially in speeches, reported conversations, and private poems from the first half of her reign, a time when she was simultaneously establishing her political authority and negotiating marriage. Her insistence on conducting her own courtships and ruling the country herself whether or not she married provoked widespread discussion and considerable resistance. Her unprecedented art of courtship, expressed in her characteristically witty, enigmatic language and forceful rhetoric, merged with a wider social controversy over conjugal freedom of choice and women's lawful liberty that helped make the Elizabethan era an extraordinarily fertile and creative period in English literature."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.