Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature
Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature

Author: Jen E. Boyle

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1351958518

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Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature explores the prevalence of anamorphic perspective in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England. Jen Boyle investigates how anamorphic media flourished in early modern England as an interactive technology and mode of affect in public interactive art, city and garden design, and as a theory and figure in literature, political theory and natural and experimental philosophy. Anamorphic mediation, Boyle brings to light, provided Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Daniel Defoe, among others, with a powerful techno-imaginary for traversing through projective, virtual experience. Drawing on extensive archival research related to the genre of "practical perspective" in early modern Europe, Boyle offers a scholarly consideration of anamorphic perspective (its technical means, performances, and embodied practices) as an interactive aesthetics and cultural imaginary. Ultimately, Boyle demonstrates how perspective media inflected a diverse set of knowledges and performances related to embodiment, affect, and collective consciousness.

Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies
Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies

Author: Lyle Massey

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 0271029803

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In Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies, Lyle Massey argues that we can only learn how and why certain kinds of spatial representation prevailed over others by carefully considering how Renaissance artists and theorists interpreted perspective. Combining detailed historical studies with broad theoretical and philosophical investigations, this book challenges basic assumptions about the way early modern artists and theorists represented their relationship to the visible world and how they understood these representations. By analyzing technical feats such as anamorphosis (the perspectival distortion of an object to make it viewable only from a certain angle), drawing machines, and printed diagrams, each chapter highlights the moments when perspective theorists failed to unite a singular, ideal viewpoint with the artist&’s or viewer&’s viewpoint or were unsuccessful at conjoining fictive and lived space.Showing how these &“failures&” were subsequently incorporated rather than rejected by perspective theorists, the book presents an important reassessment of the standard view of Renaissance perspective. While many scholars have maintained that perspective rationalized the relationships among optics, space, and painting, Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies asserts instead that Renaissance and early modern theorists often revealed a disjunction between geometrical ideals and practical applications. In some cases, they not only identified but also exploited these discrepancies. This discussion of perspective shows that the painter&’s geometry did not always conform to the explicitly rational, Cartesian formula that so many have assumed, nor did it historically unfold according to a standard account of scientific development.

The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science
The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science

Author: Howard Marchitello

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-02-27

Total Pages: 571

ISBN-13: 1137463619

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This book is about the complex ways in which science and literature are mutually-informing and mutually-sustaining. It does not cast the literary and the scientific as distinct, but rather as productively in-distinct cultural practices: for the two dozen new essays collected here, the presiding concern is no longer to ask how literary writers react to scientific writers, but rather to study how literary and scientific practices are imbricated. These specially-commissioned essays from top scholars in the area range across vast territories and produce seemingly unlikely unions: between physics and rhetoric, math and Milton, Boyle and the Bible, plague and plays, among many others. In these essays so-called scientific writing turns out to traffic in metaphor, wit, imagination, and playfulness normally associated with literature provides material forms and rhetorical strategies for thinking physics, mathematics, archeology, and medicine.

Rethinking the Mind-Body Relationship in Early Modern Literature, Philosophy, and Medicine
Rethinking the Mind-Body Relationship in Early Modern Literature, Philosophy, and Medicine

Author: Charis Charalampous

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-08-20

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1317584201

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This book explores a neglected feature of intellectual history and literature in the early modern period: the ways in which the body was theorized and represented as an intelligent cognitive agent, with desires, appetites, and understandings independent of the mind. It considers the works of early modern physicians, thinkers, and literary writers who explored the phenomenon of the independent and intelligent body. Charalampous rethinks the origin of dualism that is commonly associated with Descartes, uncovering hitherto unknown lines of reception regarding a form of dualism that understands the body as capable of performing complicated forms of cognition independently of the mind. The study examines the consequences of this way of thinking about the body for contemporary philosophy, theology, and medicine, opening up new vistas of thought against which to reassess perceptions of what literature can be thought and felt to do. Sifting and assessing this evidence sheds new light on a range of historical and literary issues relating to the treatment, perception, and representation of the human body. This book examines the notion of the thinking body across a wide range of genres, topics, and authors, including Montaigne’s Essays, Spenser’s allegorical poetry, Donne’s metaphysical poetry, tragic dramaturgy, Shakespeare, and Milton’s epic poetry and shorter poems. It will be essential for those studying early modern literature, cognition, and the body.

Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature
Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature

Author: Jennifer Ellen Boyle

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 9781409400691

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Drawing on extensive archival research, Jen Boyle investigates how the use of anamorphic perspective flourished in early modern England as a technology and medium in public interactive art, city and garden design, and as a theory and figure in literature, political theory and natural and experimental philosophy. This study offers a scholarly consideration of anamorphosis (its technical means, performances, and embodied practices) as an interactive media and cultural imaginary.

Monarchy, Print Culture, and Reverence in Early Modern England
Monarchy, Print Culture, and Reverence in Early Modern England

Author: Stephanie E. Koscak

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-06-11

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1000038548

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This richly illustrated and interdisciplinary study examines the commercial mediation of royalism through print and visual culture from the second half of the seventeenth century. The rapidly growing marketplace of books, periodicals, pictures, and material objects brought the spectacle of monarchy to a wide audience, saturating spaces of daily life in later Stuart and early Hanoverian England. Images of the royal family, including portrait engravings, graphic satires, illustrations, medals and miniatures, urban signs, playing cards, and coronation ceramics were fundamental components of the political landscape and the emergent public sphere. Koscak considers the affective subjectivities made possible by loyalist commodities; how texts and images responded to anxieties about representation at moments of political uncertainty; and how individuals decorated, displayed, and interacted with pictures of rulers. Despite the fractious nature of party politics and the appropriation of royal representations for partisan and commercial ends, print media, images, and objects materialized emotional bonds between sovereigns and subjects as the basis of allegiance and obedience. They were read and re-read, collected and exchanged, kept in pockets and pasted to walls, and looked upon as repositories of personal memory, national history, and political reverence.

Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England
Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England

Author: Jane Partner

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-04-09

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 3319710176

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This book reveals the ways in which seventeenth-century poets used models of vision taken from philosophy, theology, scientific optics, political polemic and the visual arts to scrutinize the nature of individual perceptions and to examine poetry’s own relation to truth. Drawing on archival research, Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England brings together an innovative selection of texts and images to construct a new interdisciplinary context for interpreting the poetry of Cavendish, Traherne, Marvell and Milton. Each chapter presents a reappraisal of vision in the work of one of these authors, and these case studies also combine to offer a broader consideration of the ways that conceptions of seeing were used in poetry to explore the relations between the ‘inward’ life of the viewer and the ‘outward’ reality that lies beyond; terms that are shown to have been closely linked, through ideas about sight, with the emergence of the fundamental modern categories of the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. This book will be of interest to literary scholars, art historians and historians of science.

The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies
The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies

Author: E. Aston

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-30

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0230299989

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This collection looks at the growing rapprochement between contemporary theory and early modern English literary-cultural studies. With sections on posthumanism and cognitive science, political theology, and rematerialism and performance, the essays incorporate recent theoretical inquiries into new readings of early modern texts.

Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Culture
Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Culture

Author: Professor Kathleen Perry Long

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-04-28

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1409476138

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In the wake of new interest in alchemy as more significant than a bizarre aberration in rational Western European culture, this collection examines both alchemical and medical discourses in the larger context of early modern Europe. How do early scientific discourses infiltrate other cultural domains such as literature, philosophy, court life, and the conduct of households? How do these new contexts deflect scientific pursuits into new directions, and allow a larger participation in the elaboration of scientific methods and perspectives? Might there have been a scientific subculture, particularly surrounding alchemy, which allowed women to participate in scientific pursuits long before they were admitted in an investigative capacity into official academic settings? This volume poses those questions, as a starting point for a broader discussion of scientific subcultures and their relationship to the restructuring and questioning of gender roles.

(A)wry Views
(A)wry Views

Author: David R. Castillo

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9781557532275

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The term anamorphosis, from the greek ana (again) and morphe (shape), designates a variety of perspective experiments that can be traced back to the artistic developments of the 1500's and 1600's. Anamorphic devices challenge viewers to experience different forms of perceptual oscillation and uncertainty. Images shift in front of the eyes of puzzled spectators as they move from the center of the representation to the margins, or from one side to the other. (A) Wry Views demonstrates that much of the literature of the Spanish Golden Age is susceptible, and indeed requires, oblique readings (as in anamorphosis).