Abstract

This collection explores a range of literary and historical texts from ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Iceland and medieval and early modern England to provide an understanding of wider historical continuities and discontinuities in representations of gender and revenge. It brings together approaches from literary criticism, gender theory, feminism, drama, philosophy and ethics to allow greater discussion between these subjects and across historical periods and to provide a more complex and nuanced understanding of the ways in which ideas about gender and revenge interrelate. The coverage, from classical through to renaissance literature, gives a sense of how the revenge motifs appear over time. It will appeal to a wide readership including those working in classics, medieval and renaissance literature, gender studies, revenge and revenge tragedy and the intertextual relations between ancient, medieval and early modern texts. It considers what constitutes the literary revenge tragedy tradition, suggesting points of continuity and difference as well as rethinking the parameters of the genre.