Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel
Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel

Author: Vanessa L. Ryan

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2012-06-07

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1421405911

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In Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel, Vanessa L. Ryan demonstrates how both the form and the experience of reading novels played an important role in ongoing debates about the nature of consciousness during the Victorian era. Revolutionary developments in science during the mid- and late nineteenth century—including the discoveries and writings of Herbert Spencer, William Carpenter, and George Henry Lewes—had a vital impact on fiction writers of the time. Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Henry James read contributions in what we now call cognitive science that asked, "what is the mind?" These Victorian fiction writers took a crucial step, asking how we experience our minds, how that experience relates to our behavior and questions of responsibility, how we can gain control over our mental reflexes, and finally how fiction plays a special role in understanding and training our minds. Victorian fiction writers focus not only on the question of how the mind works but also on how it seems to work and how we ought to make it work. Ryan shows how the novelistic emphasis on dynamic processes and functions—on the activity of the mind, rather than its structure or essence—can also be seen in some of the most exciting and comprehensive scientific revisions of the understanding of "thinking" in the Victorian period. This book studies the way in which the mind in the nineteenth-century view is embedded not just in the body but also in behavior, in social structures, and finally in fiction.

Between Folk and Liturgy
Between Folk and Liturgy

Author: Fletcher

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-11-20

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 900464718X

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Between Folk and Liturgy, the title of this collection, should not be understood to refer to some fixed point, some stable place between the two extremes of an illiterate and a literate culture. Rather, the title flags the wide and colourful spectrum of medieval dramatic possibility. Perhaps except one, none of the ten essays published here deal with a drama existing purely at either end of this scale. They add to our impression of the teaming fecundity and hybridism of early European drama, an impression that grows apace once we start to consider dramas situated Between Folk and Liturgy. The geographical terrain that the essays traverse ranges from the British Isles in the west to Poland in the east. The suppleness of the approaches taken here is the minimum critical requirement of anyone wanting to do justice to so complex and multifold a phenomenon as is early European drama.

Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage
Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

Author: Michelle Ephraim

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-23

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1317071018

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The first book-length examination of Jewish women in Renaissance drama, this study explores fictional representations of the female Jew in academic, private and public stage performances during Queen Elizabeth I's reign; it links lesser-known dramatic adaptations of the biblical Rebecca, Deborah, and Esther with the Jewish daughters made famous by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare on the popular stage. Drawing upon original research on early modern sermons and biblical commentaries, Michelle Ephraim here shows the cultural significance of biblical plays that have received scant critical attention and offers a new context with which to understand Shakespeare's and Marlowe's fascination with the Jewish daughter. Protestant playwrights often figured Elizabeth through Jewish women from the Hebrew scripture in order to legitimate her religious authenticity. Ephraim argues that through the figure of the Jewess, playwrights not only stake a claim to the Old Testament but call attention to the process of reading and interpreting the Jewish bible; their typological interpretations challenge and appropriate Catholic and Jewish exegeses. The plays convey the Reformists' desire for propriety over the Hebrew scripture as a "prisca veritas," the pure word of God as opposed to that of corrupt Church authority. Yet these literary representations of the Jewess, which draw from multiple and conflicting exegetical traditions, also demonstrate the elusive quality of the Hebrew text. This book establishes the relationship between Elizabeth and dramatic representations of the Jewish woman: to "play" the Jewess is to engage in an interpretive "play" that both celebrates and interrogates the religious ideology of Elizabeth's emerging Protestant nation. Ephraim approaches the relationship between scripture and drama from a historicist perspective, complicating our understanding of the specific intersections between the Jewess in Elizabethan drama, biblical commentaries, political discourse, and popular culture. This study expands the growing field of Jewish studies in the Renaissance and contributes also to critical work on Elizabeth herself, whose influence on literary texts many scholars have established.

Amadis in English
Amadis in English

Author: Helen Moore

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020-05-14

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 0198832427

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This is a book about readers: readers reading, and readers writing. They are readers of all ages and from all ages: young and old, male and female, from Europe and the Americas. The book they are reading is the Spanish chivalric romance Amad�s de Gaula, known in English as Amadis de Gaule. Famous throughout the sixteenth century as the pinnacle of its fictional genre, the cultural functions of Amadis were further elaborated by the publication of Cervantes's Don Quixote in 1605, in which Amadis features as Quixote's favourite book. Amadis thereby becomes, as the philosopher Ortega y Gasset terms it, 'enclosed' within the modern novel and part of the imaginative landscape of British reader-authors such Mary Shelley, Smollett, Keats, Southey, Scott, and Thackeray. Amadis in English ranges from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, demonstrating through this 'biography' of a book the deep cultural, intellectual, and political connections of English, French, and Spanish literature across five centuries. Simultaneously an ambitious work of transnational literary history and a new intervention in the history of reading, this study argues that romance is historically located, culturally responsive, and uniquely flexible in the re-creative possibilities it offers readers. By revealing this hitherto unexamined reading experience connecting readers of all backgrounds, Amadis in English also offers many new insights into the politicisation of literary history; the construction and misconstruction of literary relations between England, France, and Spain; the practice and pleasures of reading fiction; and the enduring power of imagination.

Common Courtesy in Eighteenth-century English Literature
Common Courtesy in Eighteenth-century English Literature

Author: William Bowman Piper

Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780874136456

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Arbuthnot as essays in common courtesy, has the author been able to explain the individual sense of each one in turn and to show how its creator made this sense widely available and widely agreeable?

Critical Analyses in English Renaissance Drama
Critical Analyses in English Renaissance Drama

Author: Brownell Salomon

Publisher: Popular Press

Published: 1979

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9780879721251

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This bibliographic guide directs the reader to a prize selection of the best modern, analytical studies of every play, anonymous play, masque, pageant, and "entertainment" written by more than two dozen contemporaries of Shakespeare in the years between 1580 and 1642. Together with Shakespeare's plays, these works comprise the most illustrious body of drama in the English language.

Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond
Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond

Author: Carole Bourne-Taylor

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 9783039114092

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From the first stirrings of modernism to contemporary poetics, the modernist aesthetic project could be described as a form of phenomenological reduction that attempts to return to the invisible and unsayable foundations of human perception and expression, prior to objective points of view and scientific notions. It is this aspect of modernism that this book brings to the fore. The essays presented here bring into focus the contemporary face of ongoing debates about phenomenology and modernism. The contributors forcefully underline the intertwining of modernism and phenomenology and the extent to which the latter offers a clue to the former. The book presents the viewpoints of a range of internationally distinguished critics and scholars, with diverse but closely related essays covering a wide range of fields, including literature, architecture, philosophy and musicology. The collection addresses critical questions regarding the relationship between phenomenology and modernism, with reference to thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Michel Henry and Paul Ricoeur. By examining the contemporary philosophical debates, this cross-disciplinary body of research reveals the pervasive and far-reaching influence of phenomenology, which emerges as a heuristic method to articulate modernist aesthetic concerns.