The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia

The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia PDF Author: D. Johanyak
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230106226
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This unique collection of essays examines the complex significations of 'Asia' in the literary and cultural production of Early Modern England. Contributors come from a range of backgrounds to bring a range of perspectives to this topic.

The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia

The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia PDF Author: D. Johanyak
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230106226
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This unique collection of essays examines the complex significations of 'Asia' in the literary and cultural production of Early Modern England. Contributors come from a range of backgrounds to bring a range of perspectives to this topic.

The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia

The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781349379637
Category : East and West in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia is an important collection of essays that examine the complex significations of "Asia" in the literary and cultural production of early modern England. It posits that the interest in merchant and overseas ventures and fascination with foreign lands influenced the canonical literary works of the period and spurred Orientalism. While such major literary figures as Marlowe, Shakespeare, Bacon, Spenser, and Milton are considered for their contribution to the writing of early modern English Orientalism, theoretical questions pertaining to the significance of postcolonial criticism and cultural studies are also addressed in this groundbreaking volume.

The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature

The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature PDF Author: Mingjun Lu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317038495
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature examines how English writers responded to the cultural shock caused by the first substantial encounter between China and Western Europe. Author Mingjun Lu explores how Donne and Milton came to be aware of England’s participation in ’the race for the Far East’ launched by Spain and Portugal, and how this new global awareness shaped their conceptions of cultural pluralism. Drawing on globalization theory, a framework that proves useful to help us rethink the literary world of Renaissance England in terms of global maritime networks, Lu proposes the concept of ’liberal cosmopolitanism’ to study early modern English engagement with the other. The advanced culture of the Chinese, Lu argues, inculcated in Donne and Milton a respect for difference and a cosmopolitan curiosity that ultimately led both authors to reflect in profound and previously unexamined ways upon their Eurocentric and monotheistic assumptions. The liberal cosmopolitan model not only opens Renaissance literary texts to globalization theory but also initiates a new way of thinking about the early modern encounter with the other beyond the conventional colonial/postcolonial, nationalist, and Orientalist frameworks. By pushing East-West contact back to the period in 1570s-1670s, Lu’s work uncovers some hitherto unrecognized Chinese elements in Western culture and their shaping influence upon English literary imagination.

Ottoman Eurasia in Early Modern German Literature

Ottoman Eurasia in Early Modern German Literature PDF Author: Gerhild Scholz Williams
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472128620
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Even a casual perusal of seventeenth-century European print production makes clear that the Turk was on everyone’s mind. Europe’s confrontation of and interaction with the Ottoman Empire in the face of what appeared to be a relentless Ottoman expansion spurred news delivery and literary production in multiple genres, from novels and sermons to calendars and artistic representations. The trans-European conversation stimulated by these media, most importantly the regularly delivered news reports, not only kept the public informed but provided the basis for literary conversations among many seventeenth-century writers, three of whom form the center of this inquiry: Daniel Speer (1636-1707), Eberhard Werner Happel (1647-1690), and Erasmus Francisci (1626-1694). The expansion of the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offers the opportunity to view these writers' texts in the context of Europe and from a more narrowly defined Ottoman Eurasian perspective. Ottoman Eurasia in Early Modern German Literature: Cultural Translations (Francisci, Happel, Speer) explores the variety of cultural and commercial conversations between Europe and Ottoman Eurasia as they negotiated their competing economic and hegemonic interests. Brought about by travel, trade, diplomacy, and wars, these conversations were, by definition, “cross-cultural” and diverse. They eroded the antagonism of “us and them,” the notion of the European center and the Ottoman periphery that has historically shaped the view of European-Ottoman interactions.

Imagining Early Modern Histories

Imagining Early Modern Histories PDF Author: Elizabeth Ketner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134803974
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Interpreting textual mediations of history in early modernity, this volume adds nuance to our understanding of the contributions fiction and fictionalizing make to the shape and texture of versions of and debates about history during that period. Geographically, the scope of the essays extends beyond Europe and England to include Asia and Africa. Contributors take a number of different approaches to understand the relationship between history, fiction, and broader themes in early modern culture. They analyze the ways fiction writers use historical sources, fictional texts translate ideas about the past into a vernacular accessible to broad audiences, fictional depictions and interpretations shape historical action, and the ways in which nonfictional texts and accounts were given fictional histories of their own, intentionally or not, through transmission and interpretation. By combining the already contested idea of fiction with performance, action, and ideas/ideology, this collection provides a more thorough consideration of fictional histories in the early modern period. It also covers more than two centuries of primary material, providing a longer perspective on the changing and complex role of history in forming early modern national, gendered, and cultural identities.

British Encounters with Ottoman Minorities in the Early Seventeenth Century

British Encounters with Ottoman Minorities in the Early Seventeenth Century PDF Author: Eva Johanna Holmberg
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030972283
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
British travellers regarded all inhabitants of the seventeenth-century Ottoman empire as ‘slaves of the sultan’, yet they also made fine distinctions between them. This book provides the first historical account of how British travellers understood the non-Muslim peoples they encountered in Ottoman lands, and of how they perceived and described them in the mediating shadow of the Turks. In doing so it changes our perceptions of the European encounter with the Ottomans by exploring the complex identities of the subjects of the Ottoman empire in the English imagination, de-centering the image of the ‘Terrible Turk’ and Islam.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment PDF Author: Valerie Traub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199663408
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 817

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 42 of the most important scholars writing on the subject today. They explore representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion, and consider Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and the performance of his plays.

Performing China

Performing China PDF Author: Chi-ming Yang
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421404419
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a model of economic and political strength, viewed by many as the greatest empire in the world. While the importance of China to eighteenth-century English consumer culture is well documented, less so is its influence on English values. Through a careful study of the literature, drama, philosophy, and material culture of the period, this book articulates how Chinese culture influenced English ideas about virtue. Discourses of virtue were significantly shaped by the intensified trade with the East Indies. Chi-ming Yang focuses on key forms of virtue—heroism, sincerity, piety, moderation, sensibility, and patriotism—whose meanings and social importance developed in the changing economic climate of the period. She highlights the ways in which English understandings of Eastern values transformed these morals. The book is organized by type of performance—theatrical, ethnographic, and literary—and by performances of gender, identity fraud, and religious conversion. In her analysis of these works, Yang brings to light surprising connections between figures as disparate as Confucius and a Chinese Amazon and between cultural norms as far removed as Hindu reincarnation and London coffeehouse culture. Part of a new wave of cross-disciplinary scholarship, where Chinese studies meets the British eighteenth century, this novel work will appeal to scholars in a number of fields, including performance studies, East Asian studies, British literature, cultural history, gender studies, and postcolonial studies.

Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama

Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama PDF Author: Murat Ögütcü
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350300462
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Despite the popularity of plays about the East, the representation of the East in early modern drama has been either overlooked, marginalized as footnotes or generalized into stereotypes. Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama focuses on the multi-layered, often conflicting and changing perceptions of the East and how dramatic works made use of their respective theatrical space to represent the concept of the East in drama. This volume re-examines the (mis)representation of the East on the early modern English outdoor and indoor stage and broadens our understanding of early modern theatrical productions beyond Shakespeare and the European continent. It traces the origin of conventional depictions of the East to university dramas and explores how they influenced the commercial stage. Chapters uncover how conflicting representations of the East were communicated on stage through the material aspects of stage architecture, costumes and performance effects. The collection emphasizes these material aspects of dramatic performances and showcases neglected plays, including George Salterne's Tomumbeius, Robert Greene's The Historie of Orlando Furioso and Joseph Simons' Leo the Armenian, and puts them in conversation with William Shakespeare's The Tempest and John Fletcher's The Island Princess.

Mapping Gendered Routes and Spaces in the Early Modern World

Mapping Gendered Routes and Spaces in the Early Modern World PDF Author: Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317100891
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
How did gender figure in understandings of spatial realms, from the inner spaces of the body to the furthest reaches of the globe? How did women situate themselves in the early modern world, and how did they move through it, in both real and imaginary locations? How do new disciplinary and geographic connections shape the ways we think about the early modern world, and the role of women and men in it? These are the questions that guide this volume, which includes articles by a select group of scholars from many disciplines: Art History, Comparative Literature, English, German, History, Landscape Architecture, Music, and Women's Studies. Each essay reaches across fields, and several are written by interdisciplinary groups of authors. The essays also focus on many different places, including Rome, Amsterdam, London, and Paris, and on texts and images that crossed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, or that portrayed real and imagined people who did. Many essays investigate topics key to the ’spatial turn’ in various disciplines, such as borders and their permeability, actual and metaphorical spatial crossings, travel and displacement, and the built environment.