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Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401202079
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
Communities have often shaped themselves around cultural spaces set apart and declared sacred. For this purpose, churches, priests or scholars no less than writers frequently participate in giving sacred figures a local habitation and, sometimes, voice or name. But whatever sites, rites, images or narratives have thus been constructed, they also raise some complex questions: how can the sacred be presented and yet guarded, claimed yet concealed, staged in public and at the same time kept exclusive? Such questions are pursued here in a variety of English texts historically employed to manifest and manage versions of the sacred. But since their performances inhabit social space, this often functions as a theatrical arena which is also used to stage modes of dissent, difference, sacrifice and sacrilege. In this way, all aspects of social life – the family, the nation, the idea of kingship, gender identities, courtly ideals, love making or smoking – may become sacralized and buttress claims for power by recourse to a repertoire of religious symbolic forms. Through critical readings of central texts and authors – such as Sir Gawain, Foxe, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, or Vaughan – as well as less canonical examples – the Croxton play, Buchanan, Lanyer, Wroth, or the tobacco pamphlets – the twelve contributions all engage with the crucial question how, and to what end, performances of the sacred affect, or effect, cultural transformation.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401202079
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Get Book Here
Book Description
Communities have often shaped themselves around cultural spaces set apart and declared sacred. For this purpose, churches, priests or scholars no less than writers frequently participate in giving sacred figures a local habitation and, sometimes, voice or name. But whatever sites, rites, images or narratives have thus been constructed, they also raise some complex questions: how can the sacred be presented and yet guarded, claimed yet concealed, staged in public and at the same time kept exclusive? Such questions are pursued here in a variety of English texts historically employed to manifest and manage versions of the sacred. But since their performances inhabit social space, this often functions as a theatrical arena which is also used to stage modes of dissent, difference, sacrifice and sacrilege. In this way, all aspects of social life – the family, the nation, the idea of kingship, gender identities, courtly ideals, love making or smoking – may become sacralized and buttress claims for power by recourse to a repertoire of religious symbolic forms. Through critical readings of central texts and authors – such as Sir Gawain, Foxe, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, or Vaughan – as well as less canonical examples – the Croxton play, Buchanan, Lanyer, Wroth, or the tobacco pamphlets – the twelve contributions all engage with the crucial question how, and to what end, performances of the sacred affect, or effect, cultural transformation.
Author: Nadia Thérèse van Pelt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042951414X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe moves away from the customary conceptual framework that artificially separates ‘medieval’ from ‘early modern’ drama to explore the role of drama and spectacle in England, France, the Low Countries, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and the German-speaking areas that now constitute Austria and Germany. This book investigates the ranges of dramatic and performative techniques and strategies that playmakers across Europe used to adapt their work to the changing contexts in which they performed, and to the changing or expanding audiences that they faced. It considers the different views expressed through drama and spectacle on shared historical events, how communities coped with similar issues and why they ritually recycled these themes through reinvented or alternative forms that replaced or existed alongside their predecessors. A wide variety of genres of play are discussed throughout, including visitatio sepulchri (visit to the tomb) plays; Easter and Passion plays and morality plays; the French civic mystère; Italian sacre rappresentazioni performed by choirboys in the context of the church; Bürgertheater from the Swiss Confederacy; drama performed for the purpose of royal entertainment and propaganda; May and summer games; and the commercial, professional theatre of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega. Examining the strength of drama in relation to the larger cultural forces to which it adapted, and demonstrating the use of social, political, economic, and artistic networks to educate and support the social structures of communities, Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe offers a broader understanding of a shared European past across the traditional chronological divide of 1500. It is ideal for students of social history, and the history of medieval and early modern drama or literature.
Author: Margret Fetzer
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847797865
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
Ever since their rediscovery in the 1920s, John Donne's writings have been praised for their energy, vigour and drama – yet so far, no attempt has been made to approach and define systematically these major characteristics of his work. Drawing on J. L. Austin's speech act theory, Margret Fetzer's comparative reading of Donne's poetry and prose eschews questions of personal or religious sincerity and instead recreates an image of John Donne as a man of many performances. No matter if engaged in the writing of a sermon or a piece of erotic poetry, Donne placed enormous trust in what words could do. Questions as to how saying something may actually bring about that very thing, or how playing the part of someone else affects an actor's identity, are central to Donne's oeuvre – and moreover highly relevant in the cultural and theological contexts of the early modern period in general. In treating both canonical and lesser known Donne texts, John Donne's Performances hopes to make a significant contribution not only to Donne criticism and research into early modern culture: by using concepts of performance and performativity as its major theoretical backdrop, it aims to establish an interdisciplinary link with the field of performance studies.
Author: J. Harris
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137090766
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 498
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Book Description
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans invented 'Indians' and populated the world with them. The global history of the term 'Indian' remains largely unwritten and this volume, taking its cue from Shakespeare, asks us to consider the proximities and distances between various early modern discourses of the Indian. Through new analysis of English travel writing, medical treatises, literature, and drama, contributors seek not just to recover unexpected counter-histories but to put pressure on the ways in which we understand race, foreign bodies, and identity in a globalizing age that has still not shed deeply ingrained imperialist habits of marking difference.
Author: Gerd Bayer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136821244
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
This collection analyzes how narrative technique developed from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the 18th century. Taking Chaucer’s influential Middle English works as the starting point, the original essays in this volume explore diverse aspects of the formation of early modern prose narratives. Essays focus on how a sense of selfness or subjectivity begins to establish itself in various narratives, thus providing a necessary requirement for the individuality that dominates later novels. Other contributors investigate how forms of intertextuality inscribe early modern prose within previous traditions of literary writing. A group of chapters presents the process of genre-making as taking place both within the confines of the texts proper, but also within paratextual features and through the rationale behind cataloguing systems. A final group of essays takes the implicit notion of the growing realism of early modern prose narrative to task by investigating the various social discourses that feature ever more strongly within the social, commercial, or religious dimensions of those texts. The book addresses a wide range of literary figures such as Chaucer, Wroth, Greene, Sidney, Deloney, Pepys, Behn, and Defoe. Written by an international group of scholars, it investigates the transformations of narrative form from medieval times through the Renaissance and the early modern period, and into the eighteenth century.
Author: David Bowe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192589415
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante provides a new perspective on the highly networked literary landscape of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy. It demonstrates the fundamental role of dialogue between and within texts in the works of four poets who represent some of the major developments in early Italian literature: Guittone d'Arezzo, Guido Guinizzelli, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante. Rather than reading the cultural landscape through the lens of Dante's works, significant though they may be, the first part of this study reconstructs the rich network of literary, especially poetic dialogue that was at the heart of medieval writing in Italy. The second part uses this reconstruction to demonstrate Dante's engagement with, and indebtedness to, the dynamics of exchange that characterised the practice of medieval Italian poets. The overall argument—for the centrality of dialogic processes to the emerging Italian literary tradition—is underpinned by a conceptualisation of dialogue in relation to medieval and modern literary theory and philosophy of language. By triangulating between Brunetto Latini's Rettorica, Mikhail Bakhtin's 'dialogism', and as sense of 'performative' speech adapted from J. L. Austin, Poetry in Dialogue shows the openness of its corpus to new dialogues and interpretations, highlighting the instabilities of even the most apparently fixed, monumental texts.
Author: T. Döring
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230627404
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
This study takes a look at a controversial question: what do the acts and shows of grief performed in early modern drama tell us about the religious culture of the world in which they were historically staged? Drawing on performance studies, it provides detailed readings of play texts to explore the politics, pathologies and parodies of mourning.
Author: M. Middeke
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230336981
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
This collection analyzes philosophical, psycho-analytic and aesthetic contexts of the discourse of melancholia in British and postcolonial literature and culture and seeks to trace the multi-faceted phenomenon of melancholia from the early modern period to the present. Texts discussed range from Shakespeare and Milton to Coetzee and Barker.
Author: Katrin Beushausen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107181453
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
The first study to systematically trace the impact of theatre on the emerging public of the early modern period.
Author: Gavin E. Schwartz-Leeper
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900431752X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
In From Princes to Pages, Gavin Schwartz-Leeper provides a wide-ranging assessment of early modern literary characterizations of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s chief minister from 1515-1529. Called the ‘other king’, Wolsey became a contested symbol of the English Reformation through diverse literary depictions that demonstrate the transformative pressures of this complex period. The author traces the development of these characterizations from the satires of John Skelton to Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, and offers new considerations of canonical and lesser-known texts by George Cavendish, John Foxe, and Raphael Holinshed. This study brings together multidisciplinary analyses to demonstrate how Wolsey’s literary lives reveal much about the contemporary shaping of this period, and argues for new ways to understand uses of the past in early modern England.
