"Rapt in Secret Studies"

Author: Laurie Johnson
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144382352X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
“Rapt in Secret Studies”: Emerging Shakespeares is a collection of new essays in Shakespeare Studies from a generation of scholars presently emerging out of Australia and New Zealand. These 18 essays respond in a myriad of ways to the challenge of Prospero’s phrase from The Tempest, in which he tells his daughter Miranda that in his life before the island he had been “rapt in secret studies”-to an early modern audience, these words were likely to mean much more than a predilection for the black arts, as modern audiences tend to hear in them. Each of the key words used by Prospero evoked a range of meanings in early modern times, to which the emerging scholars represented in this collection responded by imagining new pathways in Shakespeare Studies, a field of study that has in recent times risked being marginalised even within the traditional liberal arts. The “secret studies” of which Prospero speaks are, in fact, more liberal than dark, and so the response by new scholars to a challenge issued by one of Shakespeare’s characters more than four centuries ago has a renewed sense of relevance in the academy today. The essays are divided into three sections, each of which is oriented toward meanings that are specifically associated with one of the key terms in Prospero’s phrase. The “rapt” section has essays concerned with excess in its various forms-jealousy, obsession, sex, violence, and even death-as well as with travel and its impact on ways of knowing about the world. In the “secret” section, the nature of things about which the early modern could scarcely speak are taken into consideration, with essays on prevailing early modern myths, infidelities, stillborn children, contagion, and the instruments of secrecy such as gossip and spies. Finally, in the “study” section, essays cover issues related both to early modern textual practice-the use of historical source materials in Shakespeare’s writing, questions of multiple authorship, and the issue of early modern style and kinds of drama-and to more modern scholarly practice, such as the role of Shakespeare in the New Bibliography and the New Historicism.

"Rapt in Secret Studies"

Author: Laurie Johnson
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144382352X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 395

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Rapt in Secret Studies”: Emerging Shakespeares is a collection of new essays in Shakespeare Studies from a generation of scholars presently emerging out of Australia and New Zealand. These 18 essays respond in a myriad of ways to the challenge of Prospero’s phrase from The Tempest, in which he tells his daughter Miranda that in his life before the island he had been “rapt in secret studies”-to an early modern audience, these words were likely to mean much more than a predilection for the black arts, as modern audiences tend to hear in them. Each of the key words used by Prospero evoked a range of meanings in early modern times, to which the emerging scholars represented in this collection responded by imagining new pathways in Shakespeare Studies, a field of study that has in recent times risked being marginalised even within the traditional liberal arts. The “secret studies” of which Prospero speaks are, in fact, more liberal than dark, and so the response by new scholars to a challenge issued by one of Shakespeare’s characters more than four centuries ago has a renewed sense of relevance in the academy today. The essays are divided into three sections, each of which is oriented toward meanings that are specifically associated with one of the key terms in Prospero’s phrase. The “rapt” section has essays concerned with excess in its various forms-jealousy, obsession, sex, violence, and even death-as well as with travel and its impact on ways of knowing about the world. In the “secret” section, the nature of things about which the early modern could scarcely speak are taken into consideration, with essays on prevailing early modern myths, infidelities, stillborn children, contagion, and the instruments of secrecy such as gossip and spies. Finally, in the “study” section, essays cover issues related both to early modern textual practice-the use of historical source materials in Shakespeare’s writing, questions of multiple authorship, and the issue of early modern style and kinds of drama-and to more modern scholarly practice, such as the role of Shakespeare in the New Bibliography and the New Historicism.

Shakespeare's Comedy The Tempest

Shakespeare's Comedy The Tempest PDF Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description


The Poetics of Imperialism

The Poetics of Imperialism PDF Author: Eric Cheyfitz
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812216097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book Cheyfitz charts the course of American imperialism from the arrival of Europeans in a New World open for material and rhetorical cultivation to the violent foreign ventures of twentieth-century America in a Third World judged equally in need of cultural translation. Passionately and provocatively, he reads James Fenimore Cooper and Leslie Marmon Silko, Frederick Douglass, and Edgar Rice Burroughs within and against the imperial framework. At the center of the book is Shakespeare's "Tempest," at once transfiguring the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown and prefiguring much of American literature. In a new, final chapter, Cheyfitz reaches back to the representations of Native Americans produced by the English decades before the establishment of the Jamestown colony.

The Tempest

The Tempest PDF Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052129374X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
The Tempest is one of the most suggestive, yet most elusive of all Shakespeare's plays, and has provoked a wide range of critical interpretation. It is a magical romance, yet deeply and problematically embedded in seventeenth-century debates about authority and power. David Lindley's Introduction and commentary focus upon contemporary texts, attending to the implications of Prospero's magic, his political and paternal ambitions, and the controversial issue of his 'colonialist' control of Caliban. The Tempest was also Shakespeare's response to the new opportunities offered by the Blackfriars theatre, and careful attention is given to the play's dramatic form, stage-craft, and use of music and spectacle, to demonstrate its uniquely experimental nature.

Word and Self Estranged in English Texts, 1550–1660

Word and Self Estranged in English Texts, 1550–1660 PDF Author: L.E. Semler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351871064
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
The essays in Word and Self Estranged in English Texts, 1550-1660, consider diverse historical contexts for writing about 'strangeness'. They draw on current practices of reading to present contrasts and analogies within and between various social understandings. In so doing they reveal an interplay of thematic and stylistic modes that tells us a great deal about how, and why, certain aspects of life and thinking were 'estranged' in sixteenth and seventeenth century thinking. The collection's unique strength is that it makes specific bridges between contemporary perspectives and early modern connotations of strangeness and inhibition. The subjects of these essays are 'strange' to our ways of thinking because of their obvious distance from us in time and culture. And yet, curiously, far from being entirely alien to these texts, some of the most modern thinking-about paradigms, texts, concepts-connects with the early modern in unexpected ways. Milton meets the contemporary 'competent reader', Wittgenstein meets Robert Cawdrey, Shakespeare embraces the teenager, and Marvell matches wits with French mathematician René Thom. Additionally, the early modern texts posit their own 'others', or sites of estrangement-Moorishness, Persian art, even the human body-with which they perform their own astonishing maneuvers of estrangement and alignment. In reading Renaissance works from our own time and inviting them to reflect upon our own time, Word and Self Estranged in English Texts, 1550-1660 offers a vital reinterpretation of early modern texts.

Supernatural and Secular Power in Early Modern England

Supernatural and Secular Power in Early Modern England PDF Author: Marcus Harmes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317048369
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
For the people of early modern England, the dividing line between the natural and supernatural worlds was both negotiable and porous - particularly when it came to issues of authority. Without a precise separation between ’science’ and ’magic’ the realm of the supernatural was a contested one, that could be used both to bolster and challenge various forms of authority and the exercise of power in early modern England. In order to better understand these issues, this volume addresses a range of questions regarding the ways in which ideas, beliefs and constructions of the supernatural threatened and conflicted with authority, as well as how the power of the supernatural could be used by authorities (monarchical, religious, legal or familial) to reinforce established social norms. Drawing upon a range of historical, literary and dramatic texts the collection reveals intersecting early modern anxieties in relation to the supernatural, issues of control and the exercise of power at different levels of society, from the upper echelons of power at court to local and domestic spaces, and in a range of publication contexts - manuscript sources, printed prose texts and the early modern stage. Divided into three sections - ’Magic at Court’, ’Performance, Text and Language’ and ’Witchcraft, the Devil and the Body’ - the volume offers a broad cultural approach to the subject that reflects current research by a range of early modern scholars from the disciplines of history and literature. By bringing scholars into an interdisciplinary dialogue, the case studies presented here generate fresh insights within and between disciplines and different methodologies and approaches, which are mutually illuminating.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature PDF Author: David Hopkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199547556
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 803

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Book Description
The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This second volume, and third to appear in the series, covers the years 1558-1660, and explores the reception of the ancient genres and authors in English Renaissance literature, engaging with the major, and many of the minor, writers of the period, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Jonson. Separate chapters examine the Renaissance institutions and contexts which shape the reception of antiquity, and an annotated bibliography provides substantial material for further reading.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature PDF Author: Patrick Cheney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019107778X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 803

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Book Description
The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This second volume, and third to appear in the series, covers the years 1558-1660, and explores the reception of the ancient genres and authors in English Renaissance literature, engaging with the major, and many of the minor, writers of the period, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Jonson. Separate chapters examine the Renaissance institutions and contexts which shape the reception of antiquity, and an annotated bibliography provides substantial material for further reading.

New Directions in Early Modern English Drama

New Directions in Early Modern English Drama PDF Author: Aidan Norrie
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501513745
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
This collection examines some of the people, places, and plays at the edge of early modern English drama. Recent scholarship has begun to think more critically about the edge, particularly in relation to the canon and canonicity. This book demonstrates that the people and concepts long seen as on the edge of early modern English drama made vital contributions both within the fictive worlds of early modern plays, and without, in the real worlds of playmakers, theaters, and audiences. The book engages with topics such as child actors, alterity, sexuality, foreignness, and locality to acknowledge and extend the rich sense of playmaking and all its ancillary activities that have emerged over the last decade. The essays by a global team of scholars bring to life people and practices that flourished on the edge, manifesting their importance to both early modern audiences, and to current readers and performers.

Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theater

Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theater PDF Author: Sara Morrison
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317050746
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Offering the first sustained and comprehensive scholarly consideration of the dramatic potential of the blazon, this volume complicates what has become a standard reading of the Petrarchan convention of dismembering the beloved through poetic description. At the same time, it contributes to a growing understanding of the relationship between the material conditions of theater and interpretations of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The chapters in this collection are organized into five thematic parts emphasizing the conventions of theater that compel us to consider bodies as both literally present and figuratively represented through languge. The first part addresses the dramatic blazon as used within the conventions of courtly love. Examining the classical roots of the Petrarchan blazon, the next part explores the violent eroticism of a poetic technique rooted in Ovidian notions of metamorphosis. With similar attention paid to brutality, the third part analyzes the representation of blazonic dismemberment on stage and screen. Figurative battles become real in the fourth part, which addresses the frequent blazons surfacing in historical and political plays. The final part moves to the role of audience, analyzing the role of the observer in containing the identity of the blazoned woman as well as her attempts to resist becoming an objectified spectacle.