Imaginary Betrayals

Imaginary Betrayals PDF Author: Karen Cunningham
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204271
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
In 1352 King Edward III had expanded the legal definition of treason to include the act of imagining the death of the king, opening up the category of "constructive" treason, in which even a subject's thoughts might become the basis for prosecution. By the sixteenth century, treason was perceived as an increasingly serious threat and policed with a new urgency. Referring to the extensive early modern literature on the subject of treason, Imaginary Betrayals reveals how and to what extent ideas of proof and grounds for conviction were subject to prosecutorial construction during the Tudor period. Karen Cunningham looks at contemporary records of three prominent cases in order to demonstrate the degree to which the imagination was used to prove treason: the 1542 attainder of Katherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, charged with having had sexual relations with two men before her marriage; the 1586 case of Anthony Babington and twelve confederates, accused of plotting with the Spanish to invade England and assassinate Elizabeth; and the prosecution in the same year of Mary, Queen of Scots, indicted for conspiring with Babington to engineer her own accession to the throne. Linking the inventiveness of the accusations and decisions in these cases to the production of contemporary playtexts by Udall, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Kyd, Imaginary Betrayals demonstrates how the emerging, flexible discourses of treason participate in defining both individual subjectivity and the legitimate Tudor state. Concerned with competing representations of self and nationhood, Imaginary Betrayals explores the implications of legal and literary representations in which female sexuality, male friendship, or private letters are converted into the signs of treacherous imaginations.

Imaginary Betrayals

Imaginary Betrayals PDF Author: Karen Cunningham
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204271
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1352 King Edward III had expanded the legal definition of treason to include the act of imagining the death of the king, opening up the category of "constructive" treason, in which even a subject's thoughts might become the basis for prosecution. By the sixteenth century, treason was perceived as an increasingly serious threat and policed with a new urgency. Referring to the extensive early modern literature on the subject of treason, Imaginary Betrayals reveals how and to what extent ideas of proof and grounds for conviction were subject to prosecutorial construction during the Tudor period. Karen Cunningham looks at contemporary records of three prominent cases in order to demonstrate the degree to which the imagination was used to prove treason: the 1542 attainder of Katherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, charged with having had sexual relations with two men before her marriage; the 1586 case of Anthony Babington and twelve confederates, accused of plotting with the Spanish to invade England and assassinate Elizabeth; and the prosecution in the same year of Mary, Queen of Scots, indicted for conspiring with Babington to engineer her own accession to the throne. Linking the inventiveness of the accusations and decisions in these cases to the production of contemporary playtexts by Udall, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Kyd, Imaginary Betrayals demonstrates how the emerging, flexible discourses of treason participate in defining both individual subjectivity and the legitimate Tudor state. Concerned with competing representations of self and nationhood, Imaginary Betrayals explores the implications of legal and literary representations in which female sexuality, male friendship, or private letters are converted into the signs of treacherous imaginations.

The Betrayal

The Betrayal PDF Author: Charles William De la Poer Beresford Baron Beresford
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description


Women and Shakespeare's Cuckoldry Plays

Women and Shakespeare's Cuckoldry Plays PDF Author: Cristina León Alfar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134773455
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina León Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female sexuality that recur in the form of a slander narrative throughout William Shakespeare’s work. She argues that the plays stage a structure of accusation and defense that unravels the authority of husbands to make and unmake wives. While men’s accusations are built on a foundation of political, religious, legal, and domestic discourses about men’s superiority to, and rule over, women, whose weaker natures render them perpetually suspect, women’s bonds with other women animate defenses of virtue and obedience, fidelity and love, work loose the fabric of patrilineal power that undergirds masculine privileges in marriage, and signify a discursive shift that constitutes the site of agency within a system of oppression that ought to prohibit such agency. That women’s agency in the early modern period must be tied to the formations of power that officially demand their subjection need not undermine their acts. In what Alfar calls Shakespeare’s cuckoldry plays, women’s rhetoric of defense is both subject to the discourse of sexual honor and finds a ground on which to “shift it” as women take control of and replace sexual slander with their own narratives of marital betrayal.

A Power to Do Justice

A Power to Do Justice PDF Author: Bradin Cormack
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226116255
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
English law underwent rapid transformation in the sixteenth century, in response to the Reformation and also to heightened litigation and legal professionalization. As the common law became more comprehensive and systematic, the principle of jurisdiction came under particular strain. When the common law engaged with other court systems in England, when it encountered territories like Ireland and France, or when it confronted the ocean as a juridical space, the law revealed its qualities of ingenuity and improvisation. In other words, as Bradin Cormack argues, jurisdictional crisis made visible the law’s resemblance to the literary arts. A Power to Do Justice shows how Renaissance writers engaged the practical and conceptual dynamics of jurisdiction, both as a subject for critical investigation and as a frame for articulating literature’s sense of itself. Reassessing the relation between English literature and law from More to Shakespeare, Cormack argues that where literary texts attend to jurisdiction, they dramatize how boundaries and limits are the very precondition of law’s power, even as they clarify the forms of intensification that make literary space a reality. Tracking cultural responses to Renaissance jurisdictional thinking and legal centralization, A Power to Do Justice makes theoretical, literary-historical, and methodological contributions that set a new standard for law and the humanities and for the cultural history of early modern law and literature.

The Legal Epic

The Legal Epic PDF Author: Alison A. Chapman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022643527X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The seventeenth century saw some of the most important jurisprudential changes in England’s history, yet the period has been largely overlooked in the rich field of literature and law. Helping to fill this gap, The Legal Epic is the first book to situate the great poet and polemicist John Milton at the center of late seventeenth-century legal history. Alison A. Chapman argues that Milton’s Paradise Lost sits at the apex of the early modern period’s long fascination with law and judicial processes. Milton’s world saw law and religion as linked disciplines and thought therefore that in different ways, both law and religion should reflect the will of God. Throughout Paradise Lost, Milton invites his readers to judge actions using not only reason and conscience but also core principles of early modern jurisprudence. Law thus informs Milton’s attempt to “justify the ways of God to men” and points readers toward the types of legal justice that should prevail on earth. Adding to the growing interest in the cultural history of law, The Legal Epic shows that England’s preeminent epic poem is also a sustained reflection on the role law plays in human society.

Goddesses and Queens

Goddesses and Queens PDF Author: Annaliese Connolly
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526162873
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
The visual images of Queen Elizabeth I displayed in contemporary portraits and perpetuated and developed in more recent media, such as film and television, make her one of the most familiar and popular of all British monarchs. This collection of essays examines the diversity of the queen’s extensive iconographical repertoire, focusing on both visual and textual representations of Elizabeth, not only in portraiture and literature, but also in contemporary sermons, speeches and alchemical treatises. The collection broadens current critical thinking about Elizabeth, as each of the essays contributes to the debate about the ways in which the queen’s developing iconicity was not simply a celebratory mode, but also encoded criticism of her. Each of these essays explains the ways in which the varied representations of Elizabeth reflect the political and cultural anxieties of her subjects

Margaret Cavendish

Margaret Cavendish PDF Author: Lisa Walters
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107066433
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Exploring connections between Cavendish's science, literature, and politics, Walters challenges the view that Cavendish's thought was characterised by conservative royalism.

The Applause of the Gods, a Novel

The Applause of the Gods, a Novel PDF Author: Warren R B Dixon
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1524512346
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 719

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Book Description
This story of Faustian bargains happened in Paris in the 1950s. Using any means necessary to get to the top with her talent, Kathleen Ingersoll reached the far edge of possibility as a classical pianist. With the higher music establishment in the background, her story is neither about music nor about Paris. It is about a woman and the cost of extreme ambition, about love and other dangers, and about time and the river. Events on streets and in neighborhoods that were never in Paris are in this book the same way that Poes murders happened in the Rue Morgue. Persons who existed in the pastfor example, Josephine Bakerare images in a distorted mirror. The world in this book and the one we call real happen inches apart. Whether Kathleen Ingersolls bargains with an imaginary or true devil could actually have happened somewhere, sometime, the author leaves to his many coauthors, the readers. They necessarily will see the story as different from what the author saw in telling it.

The Illinois

The Illinois PDF Author: James Gray
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252060526
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
From the arrival of Marquette and Jolliet in 1673 to the emergence of the prairie poets---Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and Vachel Lindsay---in the twentieth century, James Gray traces the saga of the Illinois River and the people of central Illinois. In vivid prose he depicts such famous figures as the French explorer Sieur de La Salle, circuit rider Peter Cartwright, abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy, and political leader Stephen A. Douglas. His chronicle of Illinois history also includes the Indian massacre at Starved Rock, life in the French villages of the Illinois Country, the struggles of the pioneers, steamboat days in Peoria, and the operation of modern towboats on the river. Of special interest is Gray's colorful account of the Illinois background of Abraham Lincoln. A work of literary art as well as historical interpretation, The Illinois is one of the early volumes in the famous Rivers of America series.

The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700

The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 PDF Author: Lorna Hutson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191081973
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 833

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Book Description
This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England. Scholars of early modern English literature and history have increasingly found that an understanding of how people in the past thought about and used the law is key to understanding early modern familial and social relations as well as important aspects of the political revolution and the emergence of capitalism. Judicial or forensic rhetoric has been shown to foster new habits of literary composition (poetry and drama) and new processes of fact-finding and evidence evaluation. In addition, the post-Reformation jurisdictional dominance of the common law produced new ways of drawing the boundaries between private conscience and public accountability. Accordingly, historians, critics, and legal historians come together in this Handbook to develop accounts of the past that are attentive to the legally purposeful or fictional shaping of events in the historical archive. They also contribute to a transformation of our understanding of the place of forensic modes of inquiry in the creation of imaginative fiction and drama. Chapters in the Handbook approach, from a diversity of perspectives, topics including forensic rhetoric, humanist and legal education, Inns of Court revels, drama, poetry, emblem books, marriage and divorce, witchcraft, contract, property, imagination, oaths, evidence, community, local government, legal reform, libel, censorship, authorship, torture, slavery, liberty, due process, the nation state, colonialism, and empire.