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Author: Lesel Dawson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199266123
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
Lesel Dawson examines figures afflicted with erotic melancholy in early modern literature and provides a historical context for their malady. She discusses how the literary representation of lovesickness relates to wider issues of gender and identity, making an important contribution to the to the fields of literature, gender, and medical history.
Author: Lesel Dawson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191708688
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
Lesel Dawson examines figures afflicted with erotic melancholy in early modern literature and provides a historical context for their malady. She discusses how the literary representation of lovesickness relates to issues of gender and identity, making a contribution to the fields of literature, gender, and medical history
Author: Lesel Dawson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199266123
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Get Book Here
Book Description
Lesel Dawson examines figures afflicted with erotic melancholy in early modern literature and provides a historical context for their malady. She discusses how the literary representation of lovesickness relates to wider issues of gender and identity, making an important contribution to the to the fields of literature, gender, and medical history.
Author: Allison Brigid Collins
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
In early modern Europe, love was not a feeling, but a physiological change in the body. In its extreme, love was lovesickness, a deadly disease. Love makes the patient a desiring subject who seeks to author his own experience. The disease raises the stakes: if he cannot fulfill his desire, he will die. Yet lovesickness decreases the subject's agency because sickness makes the patient an object to be "read" and diagnosed by outside authorities. This paradox of increased agency and decreased control is particularly fraught when the patient is a woman. My dissertation analyzes the representation of lovesick women in early modern literature. While scholars have claimed lovesickness empowers women, I argue that the disease highlights the potential for female agency, but ultimately subjects women to external interpretation and control. A lovesick patient's body may speak for her through its symptoms, or she may voice desire. The first two chapters look at these two types of speech, with the first analyzing how narrators read lovesick female bodies and the second considering how women express lovesickness. Chapter one argues that in Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Margaret Tyler's The Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood, and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, the narrators underscore the act of reading the lovesick woman. Lovesickness makes her body legible, and the narrators, in turn, interpret the value of her desire based on how it affects the narrator's control. Chapter two turns to the lover's voice, examining female lovesickness in Gaspara Stampa's Rime and Mar a de Zayas y Sotomayor's Novelas amorosas y ejemplares and Desenga os amorosos. Both authors connect the disease to female authorship, with Stampa using it to grant her speaker authority/authorship and Zayas using the diagnosis as a misreading that the patient must correct in order to achieve authority. These texts show constant anxiety about how vulnerable women's bodies and voices are to misreading; this anxiety recalls how the narrators in chapter one read and interpreted lovesick women as a way to maintain their control. The last two chapters turn to how lovesickness is used to rewrite desiring bodies. Chapter three analyzes lovesickness as a mechanism of control in Fernando de Rojas's Celestina and William Shakespeare's As You Like It. In both texts, the disease enables female characters to seize interpretive control. In interpreting others, they also rewrite them, reshaping or creating desire. The texts cast doubt on the merits of this re-writing. The final chapter examines Shakespeare's Two Noble Kinsmen, in which outside authorities exert interpretive control to justify an unsettling "cure." Men misdiagnose the Jailer's Daughter with lovesickness so they can impose their desired narrative upon her body. Love and lovesickness are separate: while female desire is positive and creative, its diagnosis as a disease leads to medical, masculine control and a bed trick tantamount to a rape. Desire no longer produces interpretive possibilities or competition for control; instead, control obliterates women's agency and forecloses possibilities rather than creating them. The lovesick female body invites diagnosis, an act these texts compare to reading. To be diagnosed, read, and interpreted is to risk being misinterpreted and rewritten. The patient's agency yields to the doctor's control much like an author's intentions become subject to a reader's interpretation. This study of female lovesickness thus adds to gender studies and medical humanities, as well as to critical work on the history of authorship and readership.
Author: Lesel Dawson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191556092
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
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.
Author: Lisa Starks
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474430082
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Uses adaptation and appropriation studies to explore early modern textual and theatrical metamorphoses of OvidApplies contemporary theoretical approaches, such as gender/queer/trans studies, feminist ecostudies, hauntology, rhizomatic adaptation, transmedialityUses adaptation studies in analyzing early modern transformations of OvidFocuses on the appropriations of "e;Ovid"e; (as an umbrella term for "e;all things Ovidian"e;) on the early modern English stageIncludes chapters on Shakespeare and Marlowe as well as other early modern dramatistsDid you know that Ovid was a multifaceted icon of lovesickness, endless change, libertinism, emotional torment and violence in early modern England? This is the first collection to use adaptation studies in connection with other contemporary theoretical approaches in analysing early modern transformations of Ovid. It provides innovative perspectives on the 'Ovids' that haunted the early modern stage, while exploring intersections between adaptation theory and gender/queer/trans studies, ecofeminism, hauntology, transmediality, rhizomatics and more. This book examines the multidimensional, ubiquitous role that Ovid and Ovidian adaptations played in English Renaissance drama and theatrical performance.
Author: James M. Bromley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192638068
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
This book examines early modern drama's depiction of non-standard forms of masculinity grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body. Practices of extravagant dress destabilized distinctions between able-bodied and disabled, human and non-human, and the past and present, distinctions that structure normative ways of thinking about sexuality. In city comedies by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker, extravagantly dressed male characters imagine alternatives to the prevailing modes of subjectivity, sociability, and eroticism in early modern London. While these characters are situated in hostile narrative and historical contexts, this book draws on recent work on disability, materiality, and queer temporality to rethink their relationship to those contexts in order to access the world-making possibilities of early modern queer style. In their rich representations of life in London around the turn of the seventeenth century, these plays not only were, but also remain, uniquely sensitive to the intersection of sexuality, urbanization, and material culture. The attachments and pleasures of early modern sartorial extravagance they depict can estrange us from the epistemologies that narrow current thinking about sexuality's relationship to authenticity, pedagogy, interiority, and privacy.
Author: Alanna Skuse
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137487534
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 373
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Book Description
This book is open access under a CC-BY licence. Cancer is perhaps the modern world's most feared disease. Yet, we know relatively little about this malady's history before the nineteenth century. This book provides the first in-depth examination of perceptions of cancerous disease in early modern England. Looking to drama, poetry and polemic as well as medical texts and personal accounts, it contends that early modern people possessed an understanding of cancer which remains recognizable to us today. Many of the ways in which medical practitioners and lay people imagined cancer – as a 'woman's disease' or a 'beast' inside the body – remain strikingly familiar, and they helped to make this disease a byword for treachery and cruelty in discussions of religion, culture and politics. Equally, cancer treatments were among the era's most radical medical and surgical procedures. From buttered frog ointments to agonizing and dangerous surgeries, they raised abiding questions about the nature of disease and the proper role of the medical practitioner.
Author: Andrew Hadfield
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317042069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 586
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Book Description
The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The authors examine how popular culture impacted upon people's everyday lives during the period, helping to define how individuals and groups experienced the world. Issues as disparate as popular reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and superstition, and the function of festivals and rituals are discussed. This research companion will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early modern history and culture.
Author: Simon Smith
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526146460
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Considering a wide range of early modern texts, performances and artworks, the essays in this collection demonstrate how attention to the senses illuminates the literature, art and culture of early modern England. Examining canonical and less familiar literary works alongside early modern texts ranging from medical treatises to conduct manuals via puritan polemic and popular ballads, the collection offers a new view of the senses in early modern England. The volume offers dedicated essays on each of the five senses, each relating works of art to their cultural moments, whilst elsewhere the volume considers the senses collectively in particular cultural contexts. It also pursues the sensory experiences that early modern subjects encountered through the very acts of engaging with texts, performances and artworks. This book will appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, to those working in sensory studies, and to anyone interested in the art and life of early modern England.
Author: Ursula A. Potter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110662019
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
This study provides an accessible, informative and entertaining introduction to women’s sexual health as presented on the early modern stage, and how dramatists coded for it. Beginning with the rise of green sickness (the disease of virgins) from its earliest reference in drama in the 1560s, Ursula Potter traces a continuing fascination with the womb by dramatists through to the oxymoron of the chaste sex debate in the 1640s. She analyzes how playwrights employed visual and verbal clues to identify the sexual status of female characters to engage their audiences with popular concepts of women’s health; and how they satirized the notion of the womb’s insatiable appetite, suggesting that men who fear it have been duped. But the study also recognizes that, as these dramatists were fully aware, merely by bringing such material to the stage so frequently, they were complicit in perpetuating such theories.
