Players' Scepters
Author: Susan Staves
Publisher:
Published: 1979
Total Pages: 394
ISBN-13:
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The Pious Sex
Author: Andrea Radasanu
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-07-10
Total Pages: 302
ISBN-13: 0739131060
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Pious Sex strives to enlighten the reader with respect to the relationship between women and religion. The notion that there is a special relationship between women and piety may call to mind the worst of the prejudices associated with women over the ages: the characterization of women as superstitious and inherently irrational creatures who must be kept firmly in hand by the patriarchal establishment. The suggestion that there is a special relationship between women and piety conjures up the most oppressive picture of womanly virtue. The contributors of this volume revisit the claim that women constitute the pious sex and investigate the implications of such a designation. This collection of original essays examines the relationship between women and religion in the history of political thought broadly conceived. This theme is a remarkably revealing lens through which to view the Western philosophical and poetical traditions that have culminated in secular and egalitarian modern society. The essays also give highly analytical accounts of the manifold and intricate relationships between religion, family, and public life in the history of political thought, and the various ways in which these relationships have manifested themselves in pagan, Jewish, Christian, and post-Christian settings.
Samsons Cords
Author: Alex Garganigo
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2018-01-01
Total Pages: 351
ISBN-13: 148750098X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSamson's Cords examines the radically different responses of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Samuel Butler to the existential crises caused by an explosion of loyalty oaths in Britain before and after 1660.
Raising Their Voices
Author: Marilyn L. Williamson
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 1990
Total Pages: 380
ISBN-13: 9780814322093
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDangerous Familiars
Author: Frances E. Dolan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2017-04-15
Total Pages: 287
ISBN-13: 1501707272
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLooking back at images of violence in the popular culture of early modern England, we find that the specter of the murderer loomed most vividly not in the stranger, but in the familiar; and not in the master, husband, or father, but in the servant, wife, or mother. A gripping exploration of seventeenth-century accounts of domestic murder in fact and fiction, this book is the first to ask why.Frances E. Dolan examines stories ranging from the profoundly disturbing to the comically macabre: of husband murder, wife murder, infanticide, and witchcraft. She surveys trial transcripts, confessions, and scaffold speeches, as well as pamphlets, ballads, popular plays based on notorious crimes, and such well-known works as The Tempest, Othello, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale. Citing contemporary analogies between the politics of household and commonwealth, she shows how both legal and literary narratives attempt to restore the order threatened by insubordinate dependents.
Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage
Author: Cynthia Lowenthal
Publisher: SIU Press
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 302
ISBN-13: 9780809324620
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage, Cynthia Lowenthal explores identity--especially masculinity and femininity, English and "foreign," middle-class and aristocratic--as it is enacted, idealized, deployed, and redefined on the late-seventeenth-century British stage. Particular emphasis is placed on the ways the theatre contributed to new and often shifting early modern definitions of the boundaries of nation, status, and gender. The first portion of the book focuses on the playwrights' presentations of idealized men and the comic ridicule of male bodies and behaviors that fall short of the ideal. Of special interest are those moments when playwrights use stereotypes of national character, particularly the Spaniards and Turks, as examples of the worst in male behavior, judgments that are always inflected with elements of class or status inconsistency. The second portion of Lowenthal's discussion focuses on playwrights' attempts to redefine the idealized woman. Lowenthal investigates the ways that an extratheatrical discourse surrounding the actresses, one that essentialized them as sexual bodies demanding scrutiny and requiring containment, also serves to secure for them an equally essential aristocratic status. Anchored by Manley's Royal Mischief, Lowenthal's reading reveals that even a woman playwright's attempts to represent female subjectivity or interiority at odds with the surfaces of the body are doomed to return to those same surfaces. By focusing on a new, early modern lability of identity and by reading less canonical women playwrights, such as Manley and Pix, alongside established male playwrights such as Dryden and Wycherley, Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage yields both a more accurate and a more compelling picture of the cultural dynamics at work on the early modern stage.
Ways of the World
Author: Laura J. Rosenthal
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2020-11-15
Total Pages: 440
ISBN-13: 150175159X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWays of the World explores cosmopolitanism as it emerged during the Restoration and the role theater played in both memorializing and satirizing its implications and consequences. Rooted in the Stuart ambition to raise the status of England through two crucial investments—global traffic, including the slave trade, and cultural sophistication—this intensified global orientation led to the creation of global mercantile networks and to the rise of an urban British elite who drank Ethiopian coffee out of Asian porcelain at Ottoman-inspired coffeehouses. Restoration drama exposed cosmopolitanism's most embarrassing and troubling aspects, with such writers as Joseph Addison, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and William Wycherley dramatizing the emotional and ethical dilemmas that imperial and commercial expansion brought to light. Altering standard narratives about Restoration drama, Laura J. Rosenthal shows how the reinvention of theater in this period—including technical innovations and the introduction of female performers—helped make possible performances that held the actions of the nation up for scrutiny, simultaneously indulging and ridiculing the violence and exploitation being perpetuated. In doing so, Ways of the World reveals an otherwise elusive consistency between Restoration genres (comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, and tragicomedy), disrupts conventional understandings of the rise and reception of early capitalism, and offers a fresh perspective on theatrical culture in the context of the shifting political realities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.
Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution
Author: Niall Allsopp
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-05-06
Total Pages: 208
ISBN-13: 0192605224
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPoetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution presents a new interpretation of the poetry of the English revolution. It focuses on royalist poets who left their cause behind following the abolition of the monarchy, exploring how they re-imagined the traditional language of allegiance in newly secular, artificial, and absolutist ways. Following the execution of Charles I in 1649 royalists who had sided with the King were left with a significant vacuum to fill. Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution charts the poetry of Andrew Marvell, Edmund Waller, John Dryden, William Davenant, Abraham Cowley, and Margaret Cavendish amongst others in this period. It examines the poets' close acquaintance with Thomas Hobbes, offering new readings of the reception and adaptation of Hobbes's ideas in contemporary poetry. A final chapter traces how the poets survived the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, showing how they continued to apply their ideas in the heroic drama of the 1660s. Poetry and Sovereigniy in the English Revolution builds on recent work in both literary criticism and the history of political thought to contextualize royalist poets within a distinctive strain of absolutism inflected by reason of state, neostoicism, scepticism, and anticlericalism. It demonstrates a vivid poetic effort to imagine the expanded state delivered by the English Revolution.
The Critical Fortunes of Aphra Behn
Author: Janet Todd
Publisher: Camden House
Published: 1998
Total Pages: 174
ISBN-13: 9781571131652
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is the first study of the posthumous life of Aphra Behn, the extraordinary vicissitudes of her critical reception, and the personal vilifications of her reputation through three centuries. Beginning with the reception of Behn's work during her lifetime, which she herself helped to orchestrate by performing herself as a seductive woman, a beleaguered lady writer, and a serious intellectual, among other roles, the work ends with the late 20th-century reception of Behn, when the interest in gender, race, and class has made of her almost a postmodern writer. In the 17th century she was seen as a playwright of sexy and propagandist comedies, and attacked by those who disapproved her supposedly unfeminine stance and her royalist politics. Later, as the Restoration period itself fell into disrepute, Behn's plays were denigrated along with those of her fellow men, but greater opprobrium fell on her as a woman, because in the 19th century it was felt that a female writer should have higher morals than a man. During this period, Behn's reputation was exceedingly low, while her short story Oroonoko gained acclaim, freed from any association with its author or her supposedly squalid times. In the 18th and 19th centuries Oroonoko moved from being viewed as political commentary and heroic romance to a sentimental tale of doomed love and then an abolitionist text. In the early twentieth century it was hailed as one of the earliest realist texts, part of the great English ascent into the novel. JANET TODD is professor of English at the University of East Anglia
Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760
Author: Diane Purkiss
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2003-09-02
Total Pages: 484
ISBN-13: 1134938942
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe shared aim of these important new critical interventions into the early modern period is to make fresh feminist attempts to uncover the writings of Elizabethan and Jacobean women. Subject to silence, censorship and manipulation in the terms of overriding political concerns of the day, the feminist history of the early modern period is still a largely unwritten story. New feminist analysis can expose the conditions of production in which the history of the period was constructed: this revealing new Collection thereby exposes the untold stories which underpin the official texts. By beginning to explore this period from women's point of view, Women, Texts and Histories shows the crucial and fascinating ways in which women's writing may undermine many of the received assumptions on which the history of the period has depended.
