Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England
Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England

Author: Douglas A. Brooks

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 1351908839

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The relation between procreation and authorship, between reproduction and publication, has a long history - indeed, that relationship may well be the very foundation of history itself. The essays in this volume bring into focus a remarkably important and complex phase of this long history. In this volume, some of the most renowned scholars in the field persuasively demonstrate that during the early modern period, the awkward, incomplete transition from manuscript to print brought on by the invention of the printing press temporarily exposed and disturbed the epistemic foundations of English culture. As a result of this cultural upheaval, the discursive field of parenting was profoundly transformed. Through an examination of the literature of the period, this volume illuminates how many important conceptual systems related to gender, sexuality, human reproduction, legitimacy, maternity, kinship, paternity, dynasty, inheritance, and patriarchal authority came to be grounded in a range of anxieties and concerns directly linked to an emergent publishing industry and book trade. In exploring a wide spectrum of historical and cultural artifacts produced during the convergence of human and mechanical reproduction, of parenting and printing, these essays necessarily bring together two of the most vital critical paradigms available to scholars today: gender studies and the history of the book. Not only does this rare interdisciplinary coupling generate fresh and exciting insights into the literary and cultural production of the early modern period but it also greatly enriches the two critical paradigms themselves.

Illegitimacy and the National Family in Early Modern England
Illegitimacy and the National Family in Early Modern England

Author: Helen Vella Bonavita

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-02-03

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1317118936

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This study considers the figure of the bastard in the context of analogies of the family and the state in early modern England. The trope of illegitimacy, more than being simply a narrative or character-driven issue, is a vital component in the evolving construction and representation of British national identity in prose and drama of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Through close reading of a range of plays and prose texts, the book offers readers new insight into the semiotics of bastardy and concepts of national identity in early modern England, and reflects on contemporary issues of citizenship and identity. The author examines play texts of the period including Bale's King Johan, Peele's The Troublesome Reign of John, and Shakespeare's King John, Richard II, and King Lear in the context of a selection of legal, religious, and polemical texts. In so doing, she illuminates the extent to which the figure of the bastard and, more generally the trope of illegitimacy, existed as a distinct discourse within the wider discursive framework of family and nation.

The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature
The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature

Author: Rachel Stenner

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2018-07-04

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1317012879

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The typographic imaginary is an aesthetic linking authors from William Caxton to Alexander Pope, this study centrally contends. Early modern English literature engages imaginatively with printing and this book both characterizes that engagement and proposes the typographic imaginary as a framework for its analysis. Certain texts, Rachel Stenner states, describe the people, places, concerns, and processes of printing in ways that, over time, generate their own figurative authority. The typographic imaginary is posited as a literary phenomenon shared by different writers, a wider cultural understanding of printing, and a critical concept for unpicking the particular imaginative otherness that printing introduced to literature. Authors use the typographic imaginary to interrogate their place in an evolving media environment, to assess the value of the printed text, and to analyse the roles of other text-producing agents. This book treats a broad array of authors and forms: printers’ manuals; William Caxton’s paratexts; the pamphlet dialogues of Robert Copland and Ned Ward; poetic miscellanies; the prose fictions of William Baldwin, George Gascoigne, and Thomas Nashe; the poetry and prose of Edmund Spenser; writings by John Taylor and Alexander Pope. At its broadest, this study contributes to an understanding of how technology changes cultures. Located at the crossroads between literary, material, and book historical research, the particular intervention that this work makes is threefold. In describing the typographic imaginary, it proposes a new framework for analysis of print culture. It aims to focus critical engagement on symbolic representations of material forms. Finally, it describes a lineage of late medieval and early modern authors, stretching from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, that are linked by their engagement of a particular aesthetic.

Reading Material in Early Modern England
Reading Material in Early Modern England

Author: Heidi Brayman Hackel

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-02-17

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780521842518

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Reading Material in Early Modern England rediscovers the practices and representations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English readers. By telling their stories and insisting upon their variety, Brayman Hackel displaces both the singular 'ideal' reader of literacy theory and the elite male reader of literacy history.

The Poem and the Garden in Early Modern England
The Poem and the Garden in Early Modern England

Author: Deborah Solomon

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-30

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1000828042

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This book draws attention to the pervasive artistic rivalry between Elizabethan poetry and gardens in order to illustrate the benefits of a trans-media approach to the literary culture of the period. In its blending of textual studies with discussions of specific historical patches of earth, The Poem and the Garden demonstrates how the fashions that drove poetic invention were as likely to be influenced by a popular print convention or a particular garden experience as they were by the formal genres of the classical poets. By moving beyond a strictly verbal approach in its analysis of creative imitation, this volume offers new ways of appreciating the kinds of comparative and competitive methods that shaped early modern poetics. Noting shared patterns—both conceptual and material—in these two areas not only helps explain the persistence of botanical metaphors in sixteenth-century books of poetry but also offers a new perspective on the types of contrastive illusions that distinguish the Elizabethan aesthetic. With its interdisciplinary approach, The Poem and the Garden is of interest to all students and scholars who study early modern poetics, book history, and garden studies.

Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England
Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England

Author: S. Roberts

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2002-11-19

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0230286844

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This is the first comprehensive study of early modern texts, readings, and readers of Shakespeare's poems in print and manuscript, Reading Shakespeare's Poems in Early Modern England makes a compelling contribution both to Shakespeare studies and the history of the book. Examining gendered readerships and the use of erotic works, reading practises and manuscript culture, textual forms and transmission, literary taste and the canonisation of Shakespeare, this book argues that historicist criticism can no longer ignore histories of reading.

Performing Maternity in Early Modern England
Performing Maternity in Early Modern England

Author: Kathryn M. Moncrief

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9780754661177

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The essays in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England explore maternity's textual and cultural representation, performative aspects and practical consequences from 1540-1690. They emphasize that the embodied, repeated and public nature of maternity defines it as inherently performative and ultimately central to the production of gender identity in the period.

Printed Images in Early Modern Britain
Printed Images in Early Modern Britain

Author: Michael Hunter

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 1351908863

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Printed images were ubiquitous in early modern Britain, and they often convey powerful messages which are all the more important for having circulated widely at the time. Yet, by comparison with printed texts, these images have been neglected, particularly by historians to whom they ought to be of the greatest interest. This volume helps remedy this state of affairs. Complementing the online digital library of British Printed Images to 1700 (www.bpi1700.org.uk), it offers a series of essays which exemplify the many ways in which such visual material can throw light on the history of the period. Ranging from religion to politics, polemic to satire, natural science to consumer culture, the collection explores how printed images need to be read in terms of the visual syntax understood by contemporaries, their full meaning often only becoming clear when they are located in the context in which they were produced and deployed. The result is not only to illustrate the sheer richness of material of this kind, but also to underline the importance of the messages which it conveys, which often come across more strongly in visual form than through textual commentaries. With contributions from many leading exponents of the cultural history of early modern Britain, including experts on religion, politics, science and art, the book's appeal will be equally wide, demonstrating how every facet of British culture in the period can be illuminated through the study of printed images.

Waste Paper in Early Modern England
Waste Paper in Early Modern England

Author: Anna Reynolds

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-03-05

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 019888270X

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Waste Paper in Early Modern England argues that rhetorical commonplaces referring to waste paper are indicative of everyday, material experience - of an author's, reader's, housewife's, or city-dweller's immersion in an environment brimming with repurposed scraps and sheets.

The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England
The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England

Author: Patricia Fumerton

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2021-01-01

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 081229727X

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In its seventeenth-century heyday, the English broadside ballad was a single large sheet of paper printed on one side with multiple woodcut illustrations, a popular tune title, and a poem. Inexpensive, ubiquitous, and fugitive—individual elements migrated freely from one broadside to another—some 11,000 to 12,000 of these artifacts pre-1701 survive, though many others have undoubtedly been lost. Since 2003, Patricia Fumerton and a team of associates at the University of California, Santa Barbara have been finding, digitizing, cataloging, and recording these materials to create the English Broadside Ballad Archive. In this magisterial and long-awaited volume, Fumerton presents a rich display of the fruits of this work. She tracks the fragmentary assembling and disassembling of two unique extant editions of one broadside ballad and examines the loose network of seventeenth-century ballad collectors who archived what were essentially ephemeral productions. She pays particular attention to Samuel Pepys, who collected and bound into five volumes more than 1,800 ballads, and whose preoccupations with black-letter print, gender, and politics are reflected in and extend beyond his collecting practices. Offering an extensive and expansive reading of an extremely popular and sensational ballad that was printed at least 37 times before 1701, Fumerton highlights the ballad genre's ability to move audiences across time and space. In a concluding chapter, she looks to Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale to analyze the performative potential ballads have in comparison with staged drama. A broadside ballad cannot be "read" without reading it in relation to its images and its tune, Fumerton argues. To that end, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England features more than 80 illustrations and directs its readers to a specially constructed online archive where they can easily access 48 audio files of ballad music.