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Author: Eric Langley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192554921
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 498
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Book Description
Understanding the early-modern subject to be constituted, as Shakespeare's Ulysses explains, by its communications with others, this study considers what happens when these conceptions of compassionate communication and sympathetic exchange are comprehensively undermined by period anxieties concerning contagion and the transmission of disease. Allowing that 'no man is . . . any thing' until he has 'communicate[d] his parts to others', can these formative communications still be risked in a world preoccupied by communicable sickness, where every contact risks contraction, where every touch could be the touch of plague, where kind interaction could facilitate cruel infection, and where to commiserate is to risk 'miserable dependence'? Counting the cost of compassion, this study of Shakespeare's plays and poetry analyses how medical explanations of disease impact upon philosophical conceptions and literary depictions of his characters who find themselves precariously implicated within a world of ill communications. It examines the influence of scientific thought upon the history of the subject, and explores how Shakespeare—alive to both the importance and dangers of sympathetic communication—articulates an increasing sense of both the pragmatic benefits of monadic thought, emotional isolation, and subjective quarantine, while offering his account of the considerable loss involved when we lose faith in vulnerable, tender, and open existence.
Author: Eric Langley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192554921
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 498
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Book Description
Understanding the early-modern subject to be constituted, as Shakespeare's Ulysses explains, by its communications with others, this study considers what happens when these conceptions of compassionate communication and sympathetic exchange are comprehensively undermined by period anxieties concerning contagion and the transmission of disease. Allowing that 'no man is . . . any thing' until he has 'communicate[d] his parts to others', can these formative communications still be risked in a world preoccupied by communicable sickness, where every contact risks contraction, where every touch could be the touch of plague, where kind interaction could facilitate cruel infection, and where to commiserate is to risk 'miserable dependence'? Counting the cost of compassion, this study of Shakespeare's plays and poetry analyses how medical explanations of disease impact upon philosophical conceptions and literary depictions of his characters who find themselves precariously implicated within a world of ill communications. It examines the influence of scientific thought upon the history of the subject, and explores how Shakespeare—alive to both the importance and dangers of sympathetic communication—articulates an increasing sense of both the pragmatic benefits of monadic thought, emotional isolation, and subjective quarantine, while offering his account of the considerable loss involved when we lose faith in vulnerable, tender, and open existence.
Author: Eric Langley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191860973
Category : Health in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
Counting the cost of compassion, this study of Shakespeare's plays and poetry analyses how medical explanations of disease impact upon philosophical conceptions and literary depictions of his characters and how compassionate communication and sympathetic exchange are undermined by anxieties concerning contagion and disease.
Author: Mary Floyd-Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107036321
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Belief in spirits, demons and the occult was commonplace in the early modern period, as was the view that these forces could be used to manipulate nature and produce new knowledge. In this groundbreaking study, Mary Floyd-Wilson explores these beliefs in relation to women and scientific knowledge, arguing that the early modern English understood their emotions and behavior to be influenced by hidden sympathies and antipathies in the natural world. Focusing on Twelfth Night, Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, All's Well That Ends Well, The Changeling and The Duchess of Malfi, she demonstrates how these plays stage questions about whether women have privileged access to nature's secrets and whether their bodies possess hidden occult qualities. Discussing the relationship between scientific discourse and the occult, she goes on to argue that as experiential evidence gained scientific ground, women's presumed intimacy with nature's secrets was either diminished or demonized.
Author: Lauren Weindling
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817361014
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
"The proverb goes that "blood is thicker than water." But do common bloodlines in fact demand special duties or prescribe affections? Does this maxim presume that we can or should only love others biologically similar to ourselves? Are we nobler if we do, or somehow defective if we don't? "Thicker than Water" examines the roots of this belief by studying the omnipresent discourse of bloodlines and kindred relations in the literature of early modern Europe, specifically its role in the creation and maintenance of oppressive social structures. Lauren Weindling examines how drama from England, France, and Italy tests these assumptions about blood and love, exposing their underlying political function. Among the key texts that Weindling studies are Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, Pierre Corneille's Le Cid, Giambattista della Porta's La Sorella and its English analog, Thomas Middleton's No Wit/Help Like a Woman's, John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and Machiavelli's La Mandragola. Each of these plays in some way offers an extreme limit case for these beliefs in plots of love, courtship, and marriage (e.g., blood feuds or incest). They also illustrate that blood functions not as a biological basis for affinities, but discursively. Moreover, they feature the voices of marginalized groups, unprivileged by this ideology, which present significant counterpoints to this bloody worldview. Those outsiders reveal that finding alternative vocabularies to the bloody discourse of elite groups is both extremely difficult and often ineffectual, further evidenced by their persistence today. Much critical work on blood has examined this discourse as it manifests onstage: as evidence of guilt, the product of violence, or in bleeding figures. This book, instead, examines the work that blood does unseen in its connection to discourses of love and kinship-arbitrating social and emotional connections between persons, and thus underwriting our deepest forms of social organization"--
Author: Cora Fox
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526137151
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
What did it mean to be happy in early modern Europe? Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture includes essays that reframe historical understandings of emotional life in the Renaissance, focusing on under-studied feelings such as mirth, solidarity, and tranquillity. Methodologically diverse and interdisciplinary, these essays draw from the history of emotions, affect theory and the contemporary social and cognitive sciences to reveal rich and sustained cultural attention in the early modern period to these positive feelings. The book also highlights culturally distinct negotiations of the problematic binary between what constitutes positive and negative emotions. A comprehensive introduction and afterword open multiple paths for research into the histories of good feeling and their significances for understanding present constructions of happiness and wellbeing.
Author: Darryl Chalk
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030144283
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
This collection of essays considers what constituted contagion in the minds of early moderns in the absence of modern germ theory. In a wide range of essays focused on early modern drama and the culture of theater, contributors explore how ideas of contagion not only inform representations of the senses (such as smell and touch) and emotions (such as disgust, pity, and shame) but also shape how people understood belief, narrative, and political agency. Epidemic thinking was not limited to medical inquiry or the narrow study of a particular disease. Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and other early modern writers understood that someone might be infected or transformed by the presence of others, through various kinds of exchange, or if exposed to certain ideas, practices, or environmental conditions. The discourse and concept of contagion provides a lens for understanding early modern theatrical performance, dramatic plots, and theater-going itself.
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.
Author: Helen Hackett
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300207204
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 431
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Book Description
The first comprehensive guide to Elizabethan ideas about the mind What is the mind? How does it relate to the body and soul? These questions were as perplexing for the Elizabethans as they are for us today--although their answers were often startlingly different. Shakespeare and his contemporaries believed the mind was governed by the humours and passions, and was susceptible to the Devil's interference. In this insightful and wide-ranging account, Helen Hackett explores the intricacies of Elizabethan ideas about the mind. This was a period of turbulence and transition, as persistent medieval theories competed with revived classical ideas and emerging scientific developments. Drawing on a wealth of sources, Hackett sheds new light on works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney, and Spenser, demonstrating how ideas about the mind shaped new literary and theatrical forms. Looking at their conflicted attitudes to imagination, dreams, and melancholy, Hackett examines how Elizabethans perceived the mind, soul, and self, and how their ideas compare with our own.
Author: Katherine Ibbett
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812249704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
Compassion's Edge traces the relation between compassion and toleration after France's Wars of Religion. This is not, however, a story about compassion overcoming difference but one of compassion reinforcing division. It provides a robust corrective to today's hope that fellow-feeling draws us inexorably and usefully together.
Author: Richard Meek
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009280279
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive study of sympathy in the early modern period, providing a deeply researched and interdisciplinary examination of its development in Anglophone literature and culture. It argues that the term sympathy was used to refer to an active and imaginative sharing of affect considerably earlier than previous critical and historical accounts have suggested. Investigating a wide range of texts and genres, including prose fiction, sermons, poetic complaint, drama, political tracts, and scientific treatises, Richard Meek demonstrates the ways in which sympathy in the period is bound up with larger debates about society, religion, and identity. He also reveals the extent to which early modern emotions were not simply humoral or grounded in the body, but rather relational, comparative, and intertextual. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Renaissance literature and history, the history of emotions, and the history and philosophy of science.
