Medusa's Mirrors Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Metamorphosis of the Female Self

What common ground in the imaginations of these three very different writers produces such paradigms of disempowerment? The author has foregrounded three attempts both to construct and to control the female self; the common ground of the transformative mirror will tell the reader something about the poetic imaginations of the three canonical authors and provide insight into the problems of gender and power and representation in the English Renaissance.