Feminine Rhetorical Culture: Tudor Adaptations of Ovid’s Heroides

Although fictional characters do not create their own speech, the illusion that they do is often crucial to a reader’s appreciation of a literary text. Feminine Rhetorical Culture examines the development of the illusion that literary characters speak through the reader’s appreciation of a metaphorical connection between speech, sexuality, and morality. The book focuses on nominally feminine speech in the works of three male writers: Ovid, in the HEROIDES, George Turberville, in his TRANSLATION OF OVID’S Heroides, and Michael Drayton, in ENGLAND’S HEROICAL EPISTLES. In the intersection of their adaptations of culture and language, they mediate and qualify cultural perspectives about feminine speech and relationship between men and women.