New Essays on History and Form in Early Modern English Literature

New Essays on History and Form in Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Nick Moschovakis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 104009709X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Book Description
This volume convenes eight noted scholars with varied positions at the interface of formal and historical literary criticism. The editors’ introduction—a far-reaching account of how both methods have intersected in studies of early modern English texts since the 1990s—is the first such survey in more than 15 years, making it invaluable to scholars entering this area. Three essays address foundational questions about genre, fictionality, and formlessness; five feature close readings of texts or passages ranging from the more canonical (Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton) to the less so (an official record of the 1604 Hampton Court Conference). For scholars and students alike, the book thus models a variety of ways both to conceptualize and to analyze the value of literature at the formal–historical interface. Encompassing drama, lyric, satirical and polemical prose, and metrical as well as rhetorical and logical forms, the collection closes with an afterword by theorist Caroline Levine.

New Essays on History and Form in Early Modern English Literature

New Essays on History and Form in Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Nicholas Rand Moschovakis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781003368502
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"This volume convenes eight noted scholars with varied positions at the interface of formal and historical literary criticism. The editors' introduction-a far-reaching account of how both methods have intersected in studies of early modern English texts since the 1990s-is the first such survey in more than 15 years, making it invaluable to scholars entering this area. Three essays address foundational questions about genre, fictionality, and formlessness; five feature close readings of texts or passages ranging from the more canonical (Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton) to the less so (an official record of the 1604 Hampton Court Conference). For scholars and students alike, the book thus models a variety of ways both to conceptualize and to analyze the value of literature at the formal-historical interface. Encompassing drama, lyric, satirical and polemical prose, and metrical as well as rhetorical and logical forms, the collection closes with an afterword by theorist Caroline Levine"--

Law, Lawyers and Litigants in Early Modern England

Law, Lawyers and Litigants in Early Modern England PDF Author: Michael Lobban
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108491723
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
Explores the impact of legal ideas and legal consciousness on early modern English society and culture.

Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature

Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Matthew Biberman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351919369
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
Offering a profound re-assessment of the conceptual, rhetorical, and cultural intersections among sexuality, race and religion in English Renaissance texts, this study argues that antisemitism is a by-product of tensions between received Classical conceptions of masculinity and Christianity's strident critique of that ideal. Utilizing works by Shakespeare, Milton, Marlowe and others, Biberman illustrates how modern antisemitism develops as a way to stigmatize hypermasculine behavior, thus facilitating the transformation of the culture's gender ideal from knight to businessman. Subsequently, the function of antisemitism changes, becoming instead the mark of effeminate behavior. Consequently, the central antisemitic image changes from Jew-Devil to Jew-Sissy. Biberman traces this shift's repercussions, both in renaissance culture and what followed it. He also contends that as a result of this linkage between Jewishness and the limits of masculine behavior, the image of the Jewish woman remains especially unstable. In concluding, Biberman argues that the Gothic resurrects the Jew-Devil (bequeathing it to the Nazis), and that the horror genre is often a rewriting of Renaissance discourse about Jews. In the course of making this larger argument, Biberman introduces a series of more limited claims that challenge the conventional wisdom within the field of literary studies. First, Biberman overturns the assumption that Jewishness and femininity are always associated in the cultural imagination of Western Europe. Second, Biberman provides the historical context needed to understand the emergence of the stereotype of the pathological Jewish woman. Third, Biberman revises the incorrect notion that divorce was not practiced in Renaissance England. Fourth, Biberman argues for the novel claim that serial monogamy in Western culture is a practice understood to possess a Jewish "taint." Fifth, Biberman contributes a major advance in scholarship devoted to T. S. Eliot, illustrating how Eliot's famous critical argument against Milton is an expression of his antisemitism, and a coherent compliment to the antisemitic touches in his poetry. Sixth, in his discussion of Gothic literature, Biberman introduces novel readings of Frankenstein and Dracula, persuasively arguing that Mary Shelley's monster bears the mark of the Jew according to modern antisemitic discourse; and that, in Stoker, both the vampire and the vampire-killer represent Jews executing a scenario of self-policing that was realized in the ghettos and the concentration camps. Biberman's final contribution in this study is to provide a definition for postmodern antisemitism and to apply it to various contemporary incidents, including September 11th and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, 3 Volume Set

The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, 3 Volume Set PDF Author: Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405194499
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1335

Book Description
Featuring entries composed by leading international scholars, The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature presents comprehensive coverage of all aspects of English literature produced from the early 16th to the mid 17th centuries. Comprises over 400 entries ranging from 1000 to 5000 words written by leading international scholars Arranged in A-Z format across three fully indexed and cross-referenced volumes Provides coverage of canonical authors and their works, as well as a variety of previously under-considered areas, including women writers, broadside ballads, commonplace books, and other popular literary forms Biographical material on authors is presented in the context of cutting-edge critical discussion of literary works. Represents the most comprehensive resource available for those working in English Renaissance literary studies Also available online as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, providing 24/7 access and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities

Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literature

Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literature PDF Author: E. Francomano
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230612466
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Book Description
This book explores how Medieval and Early Modern writers reconstructed, and also how readers read, the contradictory meanings of "Lady" Wisdom.

Unfixable Forms

Unfixable Forms PDF Author: Katherine Schaap Williams
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501753517
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Book Description
Unfixable Forms explores how theatrical form remakes—and is in turn remade by—early modern disability. Figures described as "deformed," "lame," "crippled," "ugly," "sick," and "monstrous" crowd the stage in English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In each case, such a description distills cultural expectations about how a body should look and what a body should do—yet, crucially, demands the actor's embodied performance. In the early modern theater, concepts of disability collide with the deforming, vulnerable body of the actor. Reading dramatic texts alongside a diverse array of sources, ranging from physic manuals to philosophical essays to monster pamphlets, Katherine Schaap Williams excavates an archive of formal innovation to argue that disability is at the heart of the early modern theater's exploration of what it means to put the body of an actor on the stage. Offering new interpretations of canonical works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley, and close readings of little-known plays such as The Fair Maid of the Exchange and A Larum For London, Williams demonstrates how disability cuts across foundational distinctions between nature and art, form and matter, and being and seeming. Situated at the intersections of early modern drama, disability studies, and performance theory, Unfixable Forms locates disability on the early modern stage as both a product of cultural constraints and a spark for performance's unsettling demands and electrifying eventfulness.

Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture PDF Author: Michelle M. Dowd
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230620396
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Book Description
Dowd investigates literature's engagement with the gendered conflicts of early modern England by examining the narratives that seventeenth-century dramatists created to describe the lives of working women.

The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain

The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain PDF Author: Donald R. Kelley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521590693
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Book Description
Distinguished historians and literary scholars explore the overlap, interplay, and interaction between history and fiction.

Langland's Early Modern Identities

Langland's Early Modern Identities PDF Author: S. Kelen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230608760
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
This book uses the methodologies of cultural studies and the history of the book to show how editors and readers of the Sixteenth through the early Nineteenth century successively remade Piers Plowman and its author according to their own ideologies of the Middle Ages.