Tragicomic Redemptions

Tragicomic Redemptions

Author: Valerie Forman

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-03-26

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0812201922

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In the early modern period, England radically expanded its participation in an economy that itself was becoming increasingly global. Yet less than twenty years after the highly profitable English East India Company made its first voyage, England was suffering from an economic depression, blamed largely on the shortage of coin necessary to exploit those very same profitable routes. How could there be profit in the face of so much loss, and loss in the face of so much profit? In Tragicomic Redemptions, Valerie Forman contends that three seemingly unrelated domains—the development of new economic theories and practices, especially those related to global trade; the discourses of Christian redemption; and the rise of tragicomedy as the stage's most popular genre—were together crucial to the formulation of a new and paradoxical way of thinking about loss and profit in relationship to one another. Forman reads plays—including Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Pericles, and The Winter's Tale, Fletcher's The Island Princess, Massinger's The Renegado, and Webster's The Devil's Law-Case—alongside a range of historical materials that provide a fuller picture of England's participation in a global economy: the writings of the country's earliest economic theorists, narrative accounts of merchants and captives in the Spice Islands and the Ottoman Empire, and documents that detail the development of the English East India Company, the Levant Company, and even the very idea of the joint-stock company. Unique in its dual focus on literary form and economic practices, Tragicomic Redemptions both shows how concepts fundamental to capitalism's existence, such as "free trade," and "investment," develop within a global context and reveals the exceptional place of dramatic form as a participant in the newly emerging, public discourse of economic theory.


Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama

Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama

Author: Natasha Korda

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-11

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 1134783043

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Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama investigates the ways in which work became a subject of inquiry on the early modern stage and the processes by which the drama began to forge new connections between labor and subjectivity in the period. The essays assembled here address fascinating and hitherto unexplored questions raised by the subject of labor as it was taken up in the drama of the period: How were laboring bodies and the goods they produced, marketed and consumed represented onstage through speech, action, gesture, costumes and properties? How did plays participate in shaping the identities that situated laboring subjects within the social hierarchy? In what ways did the drama engage with contemporary discourses (social, political, economic, religious, etc.) that defined the cultural meanings of work? How did players and playwrights define their own status with respect to the shifting boundaries between high status/low status, legitimate/illegitimate, profitable/unprofitable, skilled/unskilled, formal/informal, male/female, free/bound, paid/unpaid forms of work? Merchants, usurers, clothworkers, cooks, confectioners, shopkeepers, shoemakers, sheepshearers, shipbuilders, sailors, perfumers, players, magicians, servants and slaves are among the many workers examined in this collection. Offering compelling new readings of both canonical and lesser-known plays in a broad range of genres (including history plays, comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, travel plays and civic pageants), this collection considers how early modern drama actively participated in a burgeoning, proto-capitalist economy by staging England's newly diverse workforce and exploring the subject of work itself.


Performing Economic Thought

Performing Economic Thought

Author: Bradley Ryner

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2013-12-17

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 0748684662

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This study examines the structural similarities between English mercantile treatises and drama c1600-1642. Bradley D. Ryner analyses the representational conventions of plays and mercantile treatises written between the chartering of the English East India Company in 1600 and the closing of the public playhouses at the outset of the English Civil War in 1642. He shows that playwrights' manipulation of specific elements of theatrical representation - such as metaphor, props, dramatic character, stage space, audience interaction, and genre - exacerbated the tension between the aspects of the world taken into account by a particular representation and those aspects that it neglects.


Tasting Difference

Tasting Difference

Author: Gitanjali G. Shahani

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1501748726

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Tasting Difference examines early modern discourses of racial, cultural, and religious difference that emerged in the wake of contact with foreign peoples and foreign foods from across the globe. Gitanjali Shahani reimagines the contact zone between Western Europe and the global South in culinary terms, emphasizing the gut rather than the gaze in colonial encounters. From household manuals that instructed English housewives how to use newly imported foodstuffs to "the spicèd Indian air" of A Midsummer Night's Dream, from the repurposing of Othello as an early modern pitchman for coffee in ballads to the performance of disgust in travel narratives, Shahani shows how early modern genres negotiated the allure and danger of foreign tastes. Turning maxims such as "We are what we eat" on their head, Shahani asks how did we (the colonized subjects) become what you (the colonizing subjects) eat? How did we become alternately the object of fear and appetite, loathing and craving? Shahani takes us back several centuries to the process by which food came to be inscribed with racial character and the racial other came to be marked as edible, showing how the racializing of food began in an era well before chicken tikka masala and Balti cuisine. Bringing into conversation critical paradigms in early modern studies, food studies, and postcolonial studies, she argues that it is in the writing on food and eating that we see among the earliest configurations of racial difference, and it is experienced both as a different taste and as a taste of difference.


The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

Author: Roland Greene

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-08-26

Total Pages: 1678

ISBN-13: 0691154910

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Rev. ed. of: The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics / Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, co-editors; Frank J. Warnke, O.B. Hardison, Jr., and Earl Miner, associate editors. 1993.


Travel and Travail

Travel and Travail

Author: Patricia Akhimie

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Published: 2019-01-01

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 149621031X

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Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women’s travel, whether intentional or not. Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as “an absent presence.” The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home.


World-Building and the Early Modern Imagination

World-Building and the Early Modern Imagination

Author: A. Kavey

Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan

Published: 2010-09-15

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13:

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From British attempts on the stage and page to reinvent the world order with their island at the center to the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher’s museum that strove to make the invisible visible, the early modern period was rife with attempts to reimagine the world and the human place within it. This volume looks at natural philosophers, playwrights, historians, and other figures in the period 1500-1700 as a means of accessing the plethora of world models that circulated in Europe during this era. Contributors to this volume ask what motivated institutions and individuals to engage in world-building, examining its cultural utility and the reception these new worlds received. Close textual and visual analysis provide the foundation for the book, and the array of sources illustrates the rich tapestry of ideas, anxieties, and enthusiasms that served as the basis for world-building. Only through investigating imagined worlds as closely as scholars have examined “real” Renaissance landscapes can we hope to understand the intellectual and cultural reassessments that characterized this period, and the critical importance of imagination and belief in its intellectual landscape.


Global Traffic

Global Traffic

Author: Barbara Sebek

Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan

Published: 2008-03-15

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13:

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This remarkable collection investigates the relations between literature and the economy in the context of the unprecedented expansion of early modern England’s long distance trade. Studying a range of genres and writers, both familiar and lesser known, the essays offer a new history of globalization as a complex of unevenly developing cultural, discursive, and economic phenomena. While focusing on how long distance trade contributed to England’s economic growth and cultural transformation, the collection taps into scholarly interest in race, gender, travel and exploration, domesticity, mapping, the state and emergent nationalism, and proto-colonialism in the early modern period.