We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Chapter Two focuses on imagination, the cognitive faculty allegedly residing in the front of the brain. Early moderns worried about this faculty especially, as it introduced harmful forms into girls’ minds and enabled them to produce illicit visions. But it also appears as a generative faculty in girls. The adolescents under consideration here use their imaginations to see beyond what is tangible and take on uniquely ameliorative roles in relation to dominant restrictive ideologies and damaging norms. The chapter begins with fifteen-year-old Alice Egerton and her performance as the Lady in John Milton’s Comus. Her imaginative brainwork emerges as a powerful, righteous phenomenon against her sorcerer-captor. Next, a reading of Othello’s Desdemona demonstrates how her extended imagination challenges the gender and race codes that inform the play’s basest mentalities. Desdemona also serves as a case study in how marriage binds the female mind to her husband’s fantasies, eventually limiting its cognitive reach. Finally, the chapter analyzes the teenagers of Fletcher and Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen. The “coining” brain of the Jailer’s Daughter is shown to complement and compound the brainwork of particular girls within and beyond the play — including Desdemona — and gives their previously contracted, suffocated body-minds a second life.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.