Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England

Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England PDF Author: Tara E. Pedersen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317097203
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book Here

Book Description
We no longer ascribe the term ’mermaid’ to those we deem sexually or economically threatening; we do not ubiquitously use the mermaid’s image in political propaganda or feature her within our houses of worship; perhaps most notably, we do not entertain the possibility of the mermaid’s existence. This, author Tara Pedersen argues, makes it difficult for contemporary scholars to consider the mermaid as a figure who wields much social significance. During the early modern period, however, this was not the case, and Pedersen illustrates the complicated category distinctions that the mermaid inhabits and challenges in 16th-and 17th-century England. Addressing epistemological questions about embodiment and perception, this study furthers research about early modern theatrical culture by focusing on under-theorized and seldom acknowledged representations of mermaids in English locations and texts. While individuals in early modern England were under pressure to conform to seemingly monolithic ideals about the natural order, there were also significant challenges to this order. Pedersen uses the figure of the mermaid to rethink some of these challenges, for the mermaid often appears in surprising places; she is situated at the nexus of historically specific debates about gender, sexuality, religion, the marketplace, the new science, and the culture of curiosity and travel. Although these topics of inquiry are not new, Pedersen argues that the mermaid provides a new lens through which to look at these subjects and also helps scholars think about the present moment, methodologies of reading, and many category distinctions that are important to contemporary scholarly debates.

Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England

Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England PDF Author: Tara E. Pedersen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317097203
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book Here

Book Description
We no longer ascribe the term ’mermaid’ to those we deem sexually or economically threatening; we do not ubiquitously use the mermaid’s image in political propaganda or feature her within our houses of worship; perhaps most notably, we do not entertain the possibility of the mermaid’s existence. This, author Tara Pedersen argues, makes it difficult for contemporary scholars to consider the mermaid as a figure who wields much social significance. During the early modern period, however, this was not the case, and Pedersen illustrates the complicated category distinctions that the mermaid inhabits and challenges in 16th-and 17th-century England. Addressing epistemological questions about embodiment and perception, this study furthers research about early modern theatrical culture by focusing on under-theorized and seldom acknowledged representations of mermaids in English locations and texts. While individuals in early modern England were under pressure to conform to seemingly monolithic ideals about the natural order, there were also significant challenges to this order. Pedersen uses the figure of the mermaid to rethink some of these challenges, for the mermaid often appears in surprising places; she is situated at the nexus of historically specific debates about gender, sexuality, religion, the marketplace, the new science, and the culture of curiosity and travel. Although these topics of inquiry are not new, Pedersen argues that the mermaid provides a new lens through which to look at these subjects and also helps scholars think about the present moment, methodologies of reading, and many category distinctions that are important to contemporary scholarly debates.

Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England

Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England PDF Author: Tara E. Pedersen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317097211
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Get Book Here

Book Description
We no longer ascribe the term ’mermaid’ to those we deem sexually or economically threatening; we do not ubiquitously use the mermaid’s image in political propaganda or feature her within our houses of worship; perhaps most notably, we do not entertain the possibility of the mermaid’s existence. This, author Tara Pedersen argues, makes it difficult for contemporary scholars to consider the mermaid as a figure who wields much social significance. During the early modern period, however, this was not the case, and Pedersen illustrates the complicated category distinctions that the mermaid inhabits and challenges in 16th-and 17th-century England. Addressing epistemological questions about embodiment and perception, this study furthers research about early modern theatrical culture by focusing on under-theorized and seldom acknowledged representations of mermaids in English locations and texts. While individuals in early modern England were under pressure to conform to seemingly monolithic ideals about the natural order, there were also significant challenges to this order. Pedersen uses the figure of the mermaid to rethink some of these challenges, for the mermaid often appears in surprising places; she is situated at the nexus of historically specific debates about gender, sexuality, religion, the marketplace, the new science, and the culture of curiosity and travel. Although these topics of inquiry are not new, Pedersen argues that the mermaid provides a new lens through which to look at these subjects and also helps scholars think about the present moment, methodologies of reading, and many category distinctions that are important to contemporary scholarly debates.

Confounding Categories of Knowledge

Confounding Categories of Knowledge PDF Author: Tara Elizabeth Pedersen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Get Book Here

Book Description


Chaste Value

Chaste Value PDF Author: Katherine Gillen
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474417728
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
Chaste Value reassesses chastity's significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage's production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. Plays invoke chastity-itself a quasi-commodity-to interrogate the relationship between personal and economic value. Through chastity discourse, the stage disrupts pre-capitalist ideas of intrinsic value while also reallocating such value according to emerging hierarchies of gender, race, class, and nationality. Chastity, therefore, emerges as a central category within early articulations of humanity, determining who possesses intrinsic value and, conversely, whose bodies and labor can be incorporated into market exchange.

Experiencing Nature

Experiencing Nature PDF Author: Antonio Barrera-Osorio
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292782896
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
As Spain colonized the Americas during the sixteenth century, Spanish soldiers, bureaucrats, merchants, adventurers, physicians, ship pilots, and friars explored the natural world, gathered data, drew maps, and sent home specimens of America's vast resources of animals, plants, and minerals. This amassing of empirical knowledge about Spain's American possessions had two far-reaching effects. It overturned the medieval understanding of nature derived from Classical texts and helped initiate the modern scientific revolution. And it allowed Spain to commodify and control the natural resources upon which it built its American empire. In this book, Antonio Barrera-Osorio investigates how Spain's need for accurate information about its American colonies gave rise to empirical scientific practices and their institutionalization, which, he asserts, was Spain's chief contribution to the early scientific revolution. He also conclusively links empiricism to empire-building as he focuses on five areas of Spanish activity in America: the search for commodities in, and the ecological transformation of, the New World; the institutionalization of navigational and information-gathering practices at the Spanish Casa de la Contratación (House of Trade); the development of instruments and technologies for exploiting the natural resources of the Americas; the use of reports and questionnaires for gathering information; and the writing of natural histories about the Americas.

Scaled for Success

Scaled for Success PDF Author: Philip Hayward
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0861969510
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description
Emerging from the confluence of Greco-Roman mythology and regional folklore, the mermaid has been an enduring motif in Western culture since the medieval period. It has also been disseminated more widely, initially through Western trade and colonisation and, more recently, through the increasing globalisation of media products and outlets. Scaled for Success offers the first detailed overview of the mermaids dispersal outside Europe. Complementing previous studies of the interrelationship between the mermaid and Mami Wata spirit in West Africa, this volume addresses the mermaids presence in a range of Middle Eastern, Asian, Australian, Latin American and North American contexts. Individual chapters identify the manner in which the mermaid has been variously syncretised and/or resignified in contexts as diverse as Indian public statuary, Thai cinema and Coney Islands annual Mermaid Parade. Rather than lingering as a relic of a bygone age, the mermaid emerges as a versatile, dynamic and, above all, polyvalent figure. Her prominence exemplifies the manner in which contemporary media-lore has extended the currency of established folkloric figures in new and often surprising ways. Analysing aspects of religious symbolism, visual art, literature and contemporary popular culture, this copiously illustrated volume profiles an intriguing and highly diverse phenomenon. Philip Hayward is editor of the journal Shima and holds adjunct professor positions at the University of Technology Sydney and at Southern Cross University. His previous volume, Making a Splash: Mermaids (and Mermen) in 20th and 21st Century Audiovisual Media, was published by John Libbey Publishing/Indiana University Press in 2017.

Worlds of Natural History

Worlds of Natural History PDF Author: Helen Anne Curry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131651031X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 683

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores the development of natural history since the Renaissance and contextualizes current discussions of biodiversity.

Dancing the Fairy Tale

Dancing the Fairy Tale PDF Author: Laura Katz Rizzo
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1439911223
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Dancing the Fairy Tale, Laura Katz Rizzo claims that The Sleeping Beauty is both a metaphor for ballet itself, and a powerful case study for examining ballet and its production and performance. Using Marius Petipa and Pyotr Tchaikovsky's classical dance--specifically as it was staged in Philadelphia over nearly 70 years--Katz Rizzo looks at the gendered nature of women staging, coaching, and reanimating this magnificent ballet, and well as the ongoing push-pull between tradition and innovation within the art form. Using extensive archival research, dance analysis, and American feminist theory, Dancing the Fairy Tale places women at the center of a historical narrative to reveal how the production and performance of The Sleeping Beauty in the years between 1937 and 2002 made significant contributions to the development and establishment of an American classical ballet. Katz Rizzo highlights not only what women have done not only behind the scenes, as administrators, producers, or directors of ballet companies and schools, but also as active interpreters embodying the ballet's title role. In the process, Katz Rizzo also emphasizes the importance of regional sites outside of locations traditionally understood as central to the development of ballet in the United States.

Between the Lines

Between the Lines PDF Author: Jodi Picoult
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451635818
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
Told in their separate voices, sixteen-year-old Prince Oliver, who wants to break free of his fairy-tale existence, and fifteen-year-old Delilah, a loner obsessed with Prince Oliver and the book in which he exists, work together to seek his freedom.

Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England

Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England PDF Author: Judith Deborah Haber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521518679
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book Here

Book Description
This wide-ranging study uses close readings of texts by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Middleton and Ford to investigate the intersections of erotic desire and dramatic form in the early modern period, considering to what extent disruptive desires can successfully challenge, change or undermine the structures in which they are embedded.