Early Modern English Literature
Early Modern English Literature

Author: Jason Scott-Warren

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2005-10-07

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0745627528

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When we engage with the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, we encounter a culture radically unfamiliar to us at the start of the twenty-first century. The past is a foreign country, and so too are many of its texts. This readable and provocative book seeks to enhance our understanding of early modern literature by recovering the contexts in which it was originally produced and consumed. Taking us back to the courts, theatres and marketplaces of early modern England, Jason Scott-Warren reveals the varied ways in which literary texts dovetailed with everyday experience, unlocking the distinctive social practices, economic structures and modes of behaviour that gave them meaning. He shows how the periods most beguiling writings were conditioned by long-forgotten notions of knowledge, nationhood, sexuality and personal identity. Bringing an anthropologists eye to his materials, he offers richly detailed new readings of works from within and beyond the canon, covering a span that stretches from Erasmus and More to Milton and Behn. Resisting any notion of the period as merely transitional a staging post on the road leading from the medieval to the modern world Scott-Warren reveals the distinctiveness of its literary culture, and equips the reader for fresh encounters with its extraordinary textual legacy. Any undergraduate student of the period will find it an essential guide, while scholars will find its fresh approach invigorating.

The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature
The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature

Author: David Loewenstein

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-01-16

Total Pages: 1064

ISBN-13: 1316025500

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This 2003 book is a full-scale history of early modern English literature, offering perspectives on English literature produced in Britain between the Reformation and the Restoration. While providing the general coverage and specific information expected of a major history, its twenty-six chapters address recent methodological and interpretive developments in English literary studies. The book has five sections: 'Modes and Means of Literary Production, Circulation, and Reception', 'The Tudor Era from the Reformation to Elizabeth I', 'The Era of Elizabeth and James VI', 'The Earlier Stuart Era', and 'The Civil War and Commonwealth Era'. While England is the principal focus, literary production in Scotland, Ireland and Wales is treated, as are other subjects less frequently examined in previous histories, including women's writings and the literature of the English Reformation and Revolution. This history is an essential resource for specialists and students.

Islam and Early Modern English Literature
Islam and Early Modern English Literature

Author: Benedict S. Robinson

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-12-17

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0230607438

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This book traces the process through which authors like Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton adapted, rewrote, or resisted romance, mapping a world in which new cross-cultural contacts and religious conflicts demanded a rethinking of some of the most fundamental terms of early modern identity.

Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature
Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature

Author: Katherine Acheson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1351875590

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Early modern printed books are copiously illustrated with charts, diagrams, and other kinds of images that represent systems of thought and ways of doing things. Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature shows how these images fostered what Elizabeth Eisenstein called brainwork related to concepts of space, truth, art, and nature, and reveals their importance to poetry by Andrew Marvell and John Milton, and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. The genres of illustration considered in this book include military strategy and tactics, garden design, instrumentation, Bibles, scientific schema, drawing instruction, natural history, comparative anatomy, and Aesop’s Fables. The argument produces unique insights into the ways in which visual rhetoric affected verbal expression, and the book develops novel methods of using printed images as evidence in the interpretation of the rich, strange, and beautiful literature of early modern England.

Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture
Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

Author: Michelle M. Dowd

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2009-04-13

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0230620396

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Dowd investigates literature's engagement with the gendered conflicts of early modern England by examining the narratives that seventeenth-century dramatists created to describe the lives of working women.

Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature
Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature

Author: Jennifer C. Vaught

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780754662945

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Offering new readings of works by Shakespeare, Spenser, and their contemporaries, this study examines the profound impact of the cultural shift in the English aristocracy from feudal warriors to emotionally expressive courtiers or gentlemen on all kinds of men in early modern English literature. Jennifer Vaught traces the gradual emergence of men of feeling during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the blossoming of this literary version of manhood during the eighteenth century.

Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature
Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature

Author: Anita Gilman Sherman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-04-29

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1108905358

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This ambitious account of skepticism's effects on major authors of England's Golden Age shows how key philosophical problems inspired literary innovations in poetry and prose. When figures like Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert of Cherbury, Cavendish, Marvell and Milton question theories of language, degrees of knowledge and belief, and dwell on the uncertainties of perception, they forever change English literature, ushering it into a secular mode. While tracing a narrative arc from medieval nominalism to late seventeenth-century taste, the book explores the aesthetic pleasures and political quandaries induced by skeptical doubt. It also incorporates modern philosophical views of skepticism: those of Stanley Cavell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roland Barthes, and Hans Blumenberg, among others. The book thus contributes to interdisciplinary studies of philosophy and literature as well as to current debates about skepticism as a secularizing force, fostering civil liberties and religious freedoms.

Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature
Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature

Author: Lesel Dawson

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2008-09-18

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0191556092

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In early modern medical texts, intense unfulfilled erotic desire is held to be a real and virulent disease: it is classified as a species of melancholy, with physical etiologies and cures. Lesel Dawson analyzes literary representations of lovesickness in relation to medical ideas about desire and wider questions about gender and identity, exploring the different ways that desire is believed to take root in the body, how gender roles are encoded and contested in courtship, and the psychic pains and pleasures of frustrated passion. She explores the relationship between women's lovesickness and other female maladies (such as hysteria and greensickness), and asks whether women can suffer from intellectual forms of melancholy generally thought to be exclusively male. Finally, she examines the ways in which Neoplatonism offers an alternative construction of love to that found in natural philosophy and considers how anxieties concerning love's ability to emasculate the male lover emerge indirectly in remedies for lovesickness. With reference to the works of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Ford, and Davenant, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature investigates how early modern representations of lovesickness expose contemporary cultural constructions of love, revealing the relation of sexuality to spirituality and the creation and shattering of the impassioned subject. It offers an important contribution to the history of romantic love and will be of interest to students and scholars of literature, gender, and medical history.

Disgust in Early Modern English Literature
Disgust in Early Modern English Literature

Author: Natalie K. Eschenbaum

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-20

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1317149610

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What is the role of disgust or revulsion in early modern English literature? How did early modern English subjects experience revulsion and how did writers represent it in poetry, plays, and prose? What does it mean when literature instructs, delights, and disgusts? This collection of essays looks at the treatment of disgust in texts by Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herrick, and others to demonstrate how disgust, perhaps more than other affects, gives us a more complex understanding of early modern culture. Dealing with descriptions of coagulated eye drainage, stinky leeks, and blood-filled fleas, among other sensational things, the essays focus on three kinds of disgusting encounters: sexual, cultural, and textual. Early modern English writers used disgust to explore sexual mores, describe encounters with foreign cultures, and manipulate their readers' responses. The essays in this collection show how writers deployed disgust to draw, and sometimes to upset, the boundaries that had previously defined acceptable and unacceptable behaviors, people, and literatures. Together they present the compelling argument that a critical understanding of early modern cultural perspectives requires careful attention to disgust.