Speaking Grief in English Literary Culture

Speaking Grief in English Literary Culture PDF Author: Margo Swiss
Publisher: Pittsburgh, Pa. : Duquesne University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
Grief is a universal emotion expressed in response to numerous forms of loss or bereavement. Expressing grief has been subject to varying degrees of religious and social constraint in different periods of history and in different cultures and traditions. This collection of 12 essays by both established and newer scholars explores the question of grief expression in a wide variety of writers and genres in the period from Shakespeare to Milton. Contributors examine lyric poems and plays as well as prose works such as sermons, diaries, and medical treatises to disclose the challenges faced by writers of both sexes in dealing with the trauma of loss. The roots of grief expression in personal experience or collective loss, or as described in scientific speculation or literary forms, demonstrate both the complexity and the centrality of this subject in the social and literary history of the period. Actors debate the topic of sorrow, poets wrestle with decorum and sincerity, women diarists confide their private feelings, clerics admonish the grieving with the consolations of faith, and writers discover the limitations of language and articulation in seeking to express sorrow. In the aftermath of deconstructive analyses of literature, there has been a discernible turn toward rediscovering the emotional textures of literature. The subject of grief is a good example of this trend, and this collection is one of the first efforts to address this theme in relation to a specific period of literary history.

Speaking Grief in English Literary Culture

Speaking Grief in English Literary Culture PDF Author: Margo Swiss
Publisher: Pittsburgh, Pa. : Duquesne University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
Grief is a universal emotion expressed in response to numerous forms of loss or bereavement. Expressing grief has been subject to varying degrees of religious and social constraint in different periods of history and in different cultures and traditions. This collection of 12 essays by both established and newer scholars explores the question of grief expression in a wide variety of writers and genres in the period from Shakespeare to Milton. Contributors examine lyric poems and plays as well as prose works such as sermons, diaries, and medical treatises to disclose the challenges faced by writers of both sexes in dealing with the trauma of loss. The roots of grief expression in personal experience or collective loss, or as described in scientific speculation or literary forms, demonstrate both the complexity and the centrality of this subject in the social and literary history of the period. Actors debate the topic of sorrow, poets wrestle with decorum and sincerity, women diarists confide their private feelings, clerics admonish the grieving with the consolations of faith, and writers discover the limitations of language and articulation in seeking to express sorrow. In the aftermath of deconstructive analyses of literature, there has been a discernible turn toward rediscovering the emotional textures of literature. The subject of grief is a good example of this trend, and this collection is one of the first efforts to address this theme in relation to a specific period of literary history.

Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance

Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance PDF Author: Elizabeth Hodgson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107079985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the way in which early modern women writers conceived of grief and the relationship between the dead and the living.

Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture PDF Author: Katherine Ibbett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108856438
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection is an enquiry into compassion as an early modern emotional phenomenon, situating it within the complexity of European economic, social, cultural and religious tensions. Drawing on recent work in the history of emotions, leading scholars consider the particularities of early modern compassion, demonstrating its entanglements with diverse genres and geographies. Chapters on canonical and less familiar works explore tragedy, comedy, sermons, philosophy, treatises on consolation, medical writing, and dramatic theory, showing how early modern compassion shaped attitudes and social structures that remain central to the way we imagine our response to suffering today, and how such investigations can ultimately provoke new ways of thinking about community in contemporary Europe.

Gaming the Stage

Gaming the Stage PDF Author: Gina Bloom
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472053817
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
Illuminates the fascinating, intertwined histories of games and the Early Modern theater

Emotion in the Tudor Court

Emotion in the Tudor Court PDF Author: Bradley J. Irish
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810136414
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
Deploying literary analysis, theories of emotion from the sciences and humanities, and an archival account of Tudor history, Emotion in the Tudor Court examines how literature both reflects and constructs the emotional dynamics of life in the Renaissance court. In it, Bradley J. Irish argues that emotionality is a foundational framework through which historical subjects embody and engage their world, and thus can serve as a fundamental lens of social and textual analysis. Spanning the sixteenth century, Emotion in the Tudor Court explores Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and Henrician satire; Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and elegy; Sir Philip Sidney and Elizabethan pageantry; and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and factional literature. It demonstrates how the dynamics of disgust,envy, rejection, and dread, as they are understood in the modern affective sciences, can be seen to guide literary production in the early modern court. By combining Renaissance concepts of emotion with modern research in the social and natural sciences, Emotion in the Tudor Court takes a transdisciplinary approach to yield fascinating and robust ways to illuminate both literary studies and cultural history.

The Literary Mother

The Literary Mother PDF Author: Susan C. Staub
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 078643046X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
The essays in this book examine the ideology of motherhood in British and American literature from the 16th to the 21st centuries. This book looks at the institution of motherhood, that is, at various cultural interpretations and manipulations of maternity. Presenting mothers whose roles are often empowering yet confining, these essays scrutinize three distinct aspects of motherhood: its social and cultural construction; the significance of maternal absence; and, finally, its representation as an agent of social change. Literary works examined include William Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis; Daniel Defoe's Roxana; John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath; Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury; Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son; Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Dorothy Leigh's The Mother's Blessing; and W.S. Penn's Killing Time with Strangers, among others.

The Masculinities of John Milton

The Masculinities of John Milton PDF Author: Elizabeth Hodgson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009223607
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Masculinites of John Milton is the first published monograph on Milton's men. Examining how Milton's fantasies of manly authority are framed in his major works, this study exposes the gaps between Milton's pleas for liberty and his assumptions that White men like himself should rule his culture. From schoolboys teaching each other how to traffic in young women in the Ludlow Masque, to his treatises on divorce that make the wife-less husband the best possible citizen, and to the later epics, in which Milton wrestles with male small talk and the ladders of masculine social power, his verse and prose draw from and amplify his culture's claims about manliness in education, warfare, friendship, citizenship, and conversation. This revolutionary poet's most famous writings reveal how ambivalently manhood is constructed to serve itself in early modern England.

The Subtle Knot

The Subtle Knot PDF Author: Lianne Habinek
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773554300
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the early modern period, poetic form underpinned and influenced scientific progress. The language and imagery of seventeenth-century writers and natural philosophers reveal how the age-old struggle between body and soul led to the brain’s emergence as a curiosity in its own right. Investigating the intersection of the humanities and sciences in the works of authors ranging from William Shakespeare and John Donne to William Harvey, Margaret Cavendish, and Johann Remmelin, Lianne Habinek tells how early modernity came to view the brain not simply as grey matter but as a wealth of other wondrous possibilities – a book in which to read the soul’s writing, a black box to be violently unlocked, a womb to nourish intellectual conception, a creative engine, a subtle knot that traps the soul and thereby makes us human. For seventeenth-century thinkers, she argues, these comparisons were not simply casual metaphors but integral to early ideas about brain function. Demonstrating how the disparate fields of neuroscientific history and literary studies converged, The Subtle Knot tells the story of how the mind came to be identified with the brain.

Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature

Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Jennifer C. Vaught
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351919393
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first full length treatment of how men of different professions, social ranks and ages are empowered by their emotional expressiveness in early modern English literary works, this study examines the profound impact of the cultural shift in the English aristocracy from feudal warriors to emotionally expressive courtiers or gentlemen on all kinds of men in early modern English literature. Jennifer Vaught bases her analysis on the epic, lyric, and romance as well as on drama, pastoral writings and biography, by Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Jonson and Garrick among other writers. Offering new readings of these works, she traces the gradual emergence of men of feeling during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the blossoming of this literary version of manhood during the eighteenth century.

An Collins and the Historical Imagination

An Collins and the Historical Imagination PDF Author: W. Scott Howard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317182014
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first edited collection of scholarly essays to focus exclusively on An Collins, this volume examines the significance of an important religious and political poet from seventeenth-century England. The book celebrates Collins’s writing within her own time and ours through a comprehensive assessment of her poetics, literary, religious and political contexts, critical reception, and scholarly tradition. An Collins and the Historical Imagination engages with the complete arc of research and interpretation concerning Collins’s poetry from 1653 to the present. The volume defines the center and circumference of Collins scholarship for twenty-first century readers. The book’s thematically linked chapters and appendices provide a multifaceted investigation of An Collins’s writing, religious and political milieu, and literary legacy within her time and ours.