Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England

Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England PDF Author: John S. Garrison
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317548876
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This volume brings together two vibrant areas of Renaissance studies today: memory and sexuality. The contributors show that not only Shakespeare but also a broad range of his contemporaries were deeply interested in how memory and sexuality interact. Are erotic experiences heightened or deflated by the presence of memory? Can a sexual act be commemorative? Can an act of memory be eroticized? How do forms of romantic desire underwrite forms of memory? To answer such questions, these authors examine drama, poetry, and prose from both major authors and lesser-studied figures in the canon of Renaissance literature. Alongside a number of insightful readings, they show that sonnets enact a sexual exchange of memory; that epics of nationhood cannot help but eroticize their subjects; that the act of sex in Renaissance tragedy too often depends upon violence of the past. Memory, these scholars propose, re-shapes the concerns of queer and sexuality studies – including the unhistorical, the experience of desire, and the limits of the body. So too does the erotic revise the dominant trends of memory studies, from the rhetoric of the medieval memory arts to the formation of collective pasts.

Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England

Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England PDF Author: John S. Garrison
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317548876
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume brings together two vibrant areas of Renaissance studies today: memory and sexuality. The contributors show that not only Shakespeare but also a broad range of his contemporaries were deeply interested in how memory and sexuality interact. Are erotic experiences heightened or deflated by the presence of memory? Can a sexual act be commemorative? Can an act of memory be eroticized? How do forms of romantic desire underwrite forms of memory? To answer such questions, these authors examine drama, poetry, and prose from both major authors and lesser-studied figures in the canon of Renaissance literature. Alongside a number of insightful readings, they show that sonnets enact a sexual exchange of memory; that epics of nationhood cannot help but eroticize their subjects; that the act of sex in Renaissance tragedy too often depends upon violence of the past. Memory, these scholars propose, re-shapes the concerns of queer and sexuality studies – including the unhistorical, the experience of desire, and the limits of the body. So too does the erotic revise the dominant trends of memory studies, from the rhetoric of the medieval memory arts to the formation of collective pasts.

Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England

Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England PDF Author: John S. Garrison
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317548884
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This volume brings together two vibrant areas of Renaissance studies today: memory and sexuality. The contributors show that not only Shakespeare but also a broad range of his contemporaries were deeply interested in how memory and sexuality interact. Are erotic experiences heightened or deflated by the presence of memory? Can a sexual act be commemorative? Can an act of memory be eroticized? How do forms of romantic desire underwrite forms of memory? To answer such questions, these authors examine drama, poetry, and prose from both major authors and lesser-studied figures in the canon of Renaissance literature. Alongside a number of insightful readings, they show that sonnets enact a sexual exchange of memory; that epics of nationhood cannot help but eroticize their subjects; that the act of sex in Renaissance tragedy too often depends upon violence of the past. Memory, these scholars propose, re-shapes the concerns of queer and sexuality studies – including the unhistorical, the experience of desire, and the limits of the body. So too does the erotic revise the dominant trends of memory studies, from the rhetoric of the medieval memory arts to the formation of collective pasts.

The Pleasures of Memory in Shakespeare's Sonnets

The Pleasures of Memory in Shakespeare's Sonnets PDF Author: John S. Garrison
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198857713
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
The Pleasures of Memory in Shakespeare's Sonnets uses Shakespeare's poetry as a case study for the mutually formative relationship between desire and recollection. Through a series of close readings that are both historically situated and informed by recent theory, it traces how the speaker of the poems strives for a more agential relationship to his own memory by treating recollection as a form of narrative. Drawing together insights from cognitive science, the early modern memory arts, and psychoanalysis, John S. Garrison connects the Sonnets to the larger Renaissance project of conceiving memory as a faculty to be developed and managed through self-discipline and rhetoric. In doing so, he reveals how early modern thought presaged many theories that have emerged in contemporary neuroscientific and psychoanalytic understandings of the self and its longing for pleasure. The Sonnets emerge as a collection that contemplates the affective dimensions and conceptual overlaps that bind anticipation to retrospection in the fraught pursuit of erotic pleasure. Indispensable for students and scholars working on Shakespeare's poetry, this study appeals also to a broader audience of readers interested in affect, memory, and sexuality studies. Shakespeare's most beloved sonnets are discussed, as well as less familiar ones, alongside contemporary adaptations of the poems. Garrison brings the Sonnets further into the present by comparing them with treatments of pleasure and memory by modern authors such as C.P. Cavafy, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Michael Ondaatje.

A Social History of England, 1500-1750

A Social History of England, 1500-1750 PDF Author: Keith Wrightson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781108206150
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
The rise of social history has had a transforming influence on the history of early modern England. It has broadened the historical agenda to include many previously little-studied, or wholly neglected, dimensions of the English past. It has also provided a fuller context for understanding more established themes in the political, religious, economic and intellectual histories of the period. This volume serves two main purposes. Firstly, it summarises, in an accessible way, the principal findings of forty years of research on English society in this period, providing a comprehensive overview of social and cultural change in an era vital to the development of English social identities. Second, the chapters, by leading experts, also stimulate fresh thinking by not only taking stock of current knowledge but also extending it, identifying problems, proposing fresh interpretations and pointing to unexplored possibilities. It will be essential reading for students, teachers and general readers.

Things of Darkness

Things of Darkness PDF Author: Kim F. Hall
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501725459
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The "Ethiope," the "tawny Tartar," the "woman blackamoore," and "knotty Africanisms"—allusions to blackness abound in Renaissance texts. Kim F. Hall's eagerly awaited book is the first to view these evocations of blackness in the contexts of sexual politics, imperialism, and slavery in early modern England. Her work reveals the vital link between England's expansion into realms of difference and otherness—through exploration and colonialism-and the highly charged ideas of race and gender which emerged. How, Hall asks, did new connections between race and gender figure in Renaissance ideas about the proper roles of men and women? What effect did real racial and cultural difference have on the literary portrayal of blackness? And how did the interrelationship of tropes of race and gender contribute to a modern conception of individual identity? Hall mines a wealth of sources for answers to these questions: travel literature from Sir John Mandeville's Travels to Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa; lyric poetry and plays, from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest to Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness; works by Emilia Lanyer, Philip Sidney, John Webster, and Lady Mary Wroth; and the visual and decorative arts. Concentrating on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Hall shows how race, sexuality, economics, and nationalism contributed to the formation of a modern ( white, male) identity in English culture. The volume includes a useful appendix of not readily accessible Renaissance poems on blackness.

Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England

Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England PDF Author: Mark Breitenberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521485883
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Explores the importance of heterosexual masculine identity in Renaissance literature and culture.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment PDF Author: Valerie Traub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191019720
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 969

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 40 of the most important scholars and intellectuals writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that provides a comprehensive overview of current debates.

Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and His World

Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and His World PDF Author: Subha Mukherji
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110661993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
A "blind spot" suggests an obstructed view, or partisan perception, or a localized lack of understanding. Just as the brain "reads" the "blind spot" of the visual field by a curious process of readjustment, Shakespearean drama disorients us with moments of unmastered and unmasterable knowledge, recasting the way we see, know and think about knowing. Focusing on such moments of apparent obscurity, this volume puts methods and motives of knowing under the spotlight, and responds both to inscribed acts of blind-sighting, and to the text or action blind-sighting the reader or spectator. While tracing the hermeneutic yield of such occlusion is its main conceptual aim, it also embodies a methodological innovation: structured as an internal dialogue, it aims to capture, and stake out a place for, a processive intellectual energy that enables a distinctive way of knowing in academic life; and to translate a sense of intellectual "community" into print.

Remaking English Society

Remaking English Society PDF Author: Alexandra Shepard
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1783270179
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Written by leading authorities, the volume can be considered a standard work on seventeenth-century English social history. A tribute to the work of Keith Wrightson, Remaking English Society re-examines the relationship between enduring structures and social change in early modern England. Collectively, the essays in the volume reconstruct the fissures and connections that developed both within and between social groups during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Focusing on the experience of rapid economic and demographic growth and on related processesof cultural diversification, the contributors address fundamental questions about the character of English society during a period of decisive change. Prefaced by a substantial introduction which traces the evolution of early modern social history over the last fifty years, these essays (each of them written by a leading authority) not only offer state-of-the-art assessments of the historiography but also represent the latest research on a variety of topics that have been at the heart of the development of 'the new social history' and its cultural turn: gender relations and sexuality; governance and litigation; class and deference; labouring relations, neighbourliness and reciprocity; and social status and consumption. STEVE HINDLE is W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. ALEXANDRA SHEPARD is Reader in History, University of Glasgow. JOHN WALTER is Professor of History, University of Essex. Contributors: Helen Berry, Adam Fox, H. R. French, Malcolm Gaskill, Paul Griffiths, Steve Hindle, Craig Muldrew, Lindsay O'Neill, Alexandra Shepard, Tim Stretton, Naomi Tadmor, John Walter, Phil Withington, Andy Wood

The Afterlife of Pope Joan

The Afterlife of Pope Joan PDF Author: Craig Rustici
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472024698
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Amid the religious tumult of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English scholars, preachers, and dramatists examined, debated, and refashioned tales concerning Pope Joan, a ninth-century woman who, as legend has it, cross-dressed her way to the papacy only to have her imposture exposed when she gave birth during a solemn procession. The legend concerning a popess had first taken written form in the thirteenth century and for several hundred years was more or less accepted. The Reformation, however, polarized discussions of the legend, pitting Catholics, who denied the story’s veracity, against Protestants, who suspected a cover-up and instantly cited Joan as evidence of papal depravity. In this heated environment, writers reimagined Joan variously as a sorceress, a hermaphrodite, and even a noteworthy author. The Afterlife of Pope Joan examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debates concerning the popess’s existence, uncovering the disputants’ historiographic methods, rules of evidence, rhetorical devices, and assumptions concerning what is probable and possible for women and transvestites. Author Craig Rustici then investigates the cultural significance of a series of notions advanced in those debates: the claim that Queen Elizabeth I was a popess in her own right, the charge that Joan penned a book of sorcery, and the curious hypothesis that the popess was not a disguised woman at all but rather a man who experienced a sort of spontaneous sex change. The Afterlife of Pope Joan draws upon the discourses of religion, politics, natural philosophy, and imaginative literature, demonstrating how the popess functioned as a powerful rhetorical instrument and revealing anxieties and ambivalences about gender roles that persist even today. Craig M. Rustici is Associate Professor of English at Hofstra University.