Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture
Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture

Author: Margreta de Grazia

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1996-02-23

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 9780521455893

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This collection of original essays brings together some of the most prominent figures in new historicist and cultural materialist approaches to the early modern period, and offers a new focus on the literature and culture of the Renaissance. Traditionally, Renaissance studies have concentrated on the human subject. The essays collected here bring objects - purses, clothes, tapestries, houses, maps, feathers, communion wafers, tools, pages, skulls - back into view. As a result, the much-vaunted early modern subject ceases to look autonomous and sovereign, but is instead caught up in a vast and uneven world of objects which he and she makes, owns, values, imagines, and represents. This book puts things back into relation with people; in the process, it elicits new critical readings, and new cultural configurations.

A Search for Meaning
A Search for Meaning

Author: Paula Harms Payne

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 9780820471129

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In its exploration of drama, poetry, and prose, this collection of nine essays invites students, teachers, and scholars to rethink their evaluations of Shakespeare, Milton, Sidney, Jonson, and other British writers of the Early Modern period. Using a formalist approach, A Search for Meaning establishes new critical perspectives that are dependent on close readings of the text and current secondary research and which carefully consider reader's reactions.

Worldmaking Spenser
Worldmaking Spenser

Author: Patrick Cheney

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published:

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780813127408

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ChinaÕs enormous size, vast population, abundant natural resources, robust economy, and modern military suggest that it will emerge as a great world power. Inside ChinaÕs Grand Strategy: The Perspective from the PeopleÕs Republic offers unique insights from a prominent Chinese scholar about the countryÕs geopolitical ambitions and strategic thinking. Ye Zicheng, professor of political science in the School of International Studies at Peking University, examines ChinaÕs interactions with current world powers as well as its policies toward neighboring countries. Despite claims that repressive domestic policies and an economic slowdown are evidence that the countryÕs efforts toward modernization will fail, Ye points to ChinaÕs inclusion in the G-20 as an indicator of success. Ye compares ChinaÕs global ascension, particularly its emphasis on peace, to the historical experiences of rising European superpowers, providing an insider look at a country poised to become an increasingly prominent international power.

Imagining Childhood
Imagining Childhood

Author: Erika Langmuir

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780300101317

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The images of children that abound in Western art do not simply mirror reality; they are imaginative constructs, representing childhood as a special stage of human life, or emblematic of the human condition itself. In a compelling book ranging widely across time, national boundaries, and genres from ancient Egyptian amulets to Picasso's Guernica, Erika Langmuir demonstrates that no historic period has a monopoly on the 'discovery of childhood'. Famous pictures by great artists, as well as barely known anonymous artefacts, illustrate not only Western society's perennially ambivalent attitudes to children, but also the many and varied functions that works of art have played throughout its history.

Milton's Theological Process
Milton's Theological Process

Author: Jason A. Kerr

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-01-12

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0198875088

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This volume proposes a method for reading Milton's De Doctrina Christiana as an artifact of his process of theological thinking rather than as a repository of his doctrinal views. Jason A. Kerr argues that reading in this way involves attention to the complex material state of the manuscript along with Milton's varying modes of engagement with scripture and various theological interlocutors, and reveals that Milton's approach to theology underwent significant change in the course of his work on the treatise. Initially, Milton set out to use Ramist logic to organize scripture in a way that drew out its intrinsic doctrinal structure. This method had two unintended consequences: it drove Milton to an antitrinitarian understanding of the Son of God, and it obliged him to reflect on his own authority as an interpreter and to develop an ecclesiology capable of sifting divine truth from human error. Consequently, Milton's Theological Process explores the complex interplay between Milton's preconceived theological ideas and his willingness to change his mind as it develops through the layers of revision in the manuscript. Kerr concludes by considering Paradise Lost as a vehicle for Milton's further reflection on the foundations of theology--and by showing how even the epic presents challenges to the fruits of these reflections. Reading Milton theologically means more than working to ascertain his doctrinal views; it means attending critically to his messy process of evaluating and rethinking the doctrinal views to which his prior study had led him.

Brutal Reasoning
Brutal Reasoning

Author: Erica Fudge

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-02-15

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 1501730975

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Early modern English thinkers were fascinated by the subject of animal rationality, even before the appearance of Descartes's Discourse on the Method (1637) and its famous declaration of the automatism of animals. But as Erica Fudge relates in Brutal Reasoning, the discussions were not as straightforward—or as reflexively anthropocentric—as has been assumed. Surveying a wide range of texts-religious, philosophical, literary, even comic-Fudge explains the crucial role that reason played in conceptualizations of the human and the animal, as well as the distinctions between the two. Brutal Reasoning looks at the ways in which humans were conceptualized, at what being "human" meant, and at how humans could lose their humanity. It also takes up the questions of what made an animal an animal, why animals were studied in the early modern period, and at how people understood, and misunderstood, what they saw when they did look. From the influence of classical thinking on the human-animal divide and debates surrounding the rationality of women, children, and Native Americans to the frequent references in popular and pedagogical texts to Morocco the Intelligent Horse, Fudge gives a new and vital context to the human perception of animals in this period. At the same time, she challenges overly simplistic notions about early modern attitudes to animals and about the impact of those attitudes on modern culture.

Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe
Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe

Author: Andrea Pearson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1351872265

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As one of the first books to treat portraits of early modern women as a discrete subject, this volume considers the possibilities and limits of agency and identity for women in history and, with particular attention to gender, as categories of analysis for women's images. Its nine original essays on Italy, the Low Countries, Germany, France, and England deepen the usefulness of these analytical tools for portraiture. Among the book's broad contributions: it dispels false assumptions about agency's possibilities and limits, showing how agency can be located outside of conventional understanding, and, conversely, how it can be stretched too far. It demonstrates that agency is compatible with relational gender analysis, especially when alternative agencies such as spectatorship are taken into account. It also makes evident the importance of aesthetics for the study of identity and agency. The individual essays reveal, among other things, how portraits broadened the traditional parameters of portraiture, explored transvestism and same-sex eroticism, appropriated aspects of male portraiture to claim those values for their sitters, and, as sites for gender negotiation, resistance, and debate, invoked considerable relational anxiety. Richly layered in method, the book offers an array of provocative insights into its subject.