Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

Women and Race in Early Modern Texts PDF Author: Joyce Green MacDonald
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113943411X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Joyce Green MacDonald discusses the links between women's racial, sexual, and civic identities in early modern texts. She examines the scarcity of African women in English plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the racial identity of the women in the drama and also that of the women who watched and sometimes wrote the plays. The coverage also includes texts from the late fourteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, by, among others, Shakespeare, Jonson, Davenant, the Countess of Pembroke, and Aphra Behn. MacDonald articulates many of her discussions of early modern women's races through a comparative method, using insights drawn from critical race theory, women's history, and contemporary disputes over canonicity, multiculturalism, and Afrocentrism. Seeing women as identified by their race and social standing as well as by their sex, this book will add depth and dimension to discussions of women's writing and of gender in Renaissance literature.

Women, 'Race' and Writing in the Early Modern Period

Women, 'Race' and Writing in the Early Modern Period PDF Author: Margo Hendricks
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135088047
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Women, `Race' and Writing in the Early Modern Period is an extraordinarily comprehensive interdisciplinary examination of one of the most neglected areas in current scholarship. The contributors use literary, historical, anthropological and medical materials to explore an important intersection within the major era of European imperial expansion. The volume looks at: * the conditions of women's writing and the problems of female authorship in the period. * the tensions between recent feminist criticism and the questions of `race', empire and colonialism. *the relationship between the early modern period and post-colonial theory and recent African writing. Women, `Race' and Writing in the Early Modern Period contains ground-breaking work by some of the most exciting scholars in contemporary criticism and theory. It will be vital reading for anyone working or studying in the field.

Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

Women and Race in Early Modern Texts PDF Author: Joyce Green MacDonald
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113943411X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Joyce Green MacDonald discusses the links between women's racial, sexual, and civic identities in early modern texts. She examines the scarcity of African women in English plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the racial identity of the women in the drama and also that of the women who watched and sometimes wrote the plays. The coverage also includes texts from the late fourteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, by, among others, Shakespeare, Jonson, Davenant, the Countess of Pembroke, and Aphra Behn. MacDonald articulates many of her discussions of early modern women's races through a comparative method, using insights drawn from critical race theory, women's history, and contemporary disputes over canonicity, multiculturalism, and Afrocentrism. Seeing women as identified by their race and social standing as well as by their sex, this book will add depth and dimension to discussions of women's writing and of gender in Renaissance literature.

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.

Race & Affect in Early Modern English Literature

Race & Affect in Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Carol Meija LaPerle
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780866986939
Category : Affect (Psychology) in literature
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature puts the fields of critical race studies and affect theory into dialogue. Doing so opens a new set of questions: What are the emotional experiences of racial formation and racist ideologies? How do feelings--through the physical senses, emotional passions, or sexual encounters--come to signify race? What is the affective register of anti-blackness that pervades canonical literature? How can these visceral forms of racism be resisted in discourse and in practice? By investigating how race feels, this book offers new ways of reading and interpreting literary traditions, religious differences, gendered experiences, class hierarchies, sexuality, and social identities. So far scholars have shaped the discussion of race in the early modern period by focusing on topics such as genealogy, language, economics, religion, skin color, and ethnicity. This book, however, offers something new: it considers racializing processes as visceral, affective experiences"--

Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies

Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies PDF Author: Ania Loomba
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317064240
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women’s Collaborative Book Prize 2017 Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies is a volume of essays by leading scholars in the field of early modern studies on the history, present state, and future possibilities of feminist criticism and theory. It responds to current anxieties that feminist criticism is in a state of decline by attending to debates and differences that have emerged in light of ongoing scholarly discussions of race, affect, sexuality, and transnationalism-work that compels us continually to reassess our definitions of ’women’ and gender. Rethinking Feminism demonstrates how studies of early modern literature, history, and culture can contribute to a reimagination of feminist aims, methods, and objects of study at this historical juncture. While the scholars contributing to Rethinking Feminism have very different interests and methods, they are united in their conviction that early modern studies must be in dialogue with, and indeed contribute to, larger theoretical and political debates about gender, race, and sexuality, and to the relationship between these areas. To this end, the essays not only analyze literary texts and cultural practices to shed light on early modern ideology and politics, but also address metacritical questions of methodology and theory. Taken together, they show how a consciousness of the complexity of the past allows us to rethink the genealogies and historical stakes of current scholarly norms and debates.

The Subjection of Women

The Subjection of Women PDF Author: John Stuart Mill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Women
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
The object of this essay is to explain as clearly as I am able, the grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period when I had formed any opinions at all on social or political matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly growing stronger by the progress of reflection and the experience of life: That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes- the legal subordination of one sex to the other- is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement ; and that is ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.

English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama

English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama PDF Author: Mary Floyd-Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521810562
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Table of contents

Race in Early Modern England

Race in Early Modern England PDF Author: J. Burton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230607330
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
This collection makes available for the first time a rich archive of materials that illuminate the history of racial thought and practices in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. A comprehensive introduction shows how these writings are crucial for understanding the pre-Enlightenment lineages of racial categories.

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage PDF Author: Ayanna Thompson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135908559
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage provides the first sustained reading of Restoration plays through a performance theory lens. This approach shows that an analysis of the conjoined performances of torture and race not only reveals the early modern interest in the nature of racial identity, but also how race was initially coded in a paradoxical fashion as both essentially fixed and socially constructed. An examination of scenes of torture provides the most effective way to unearth these seemingly contradictory representations of race because depictions of torture often interrogate the incongruous desire to substitute the visible and manipulable materiality of the body for the more illusive performative nature of identity. In turn, Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage challenges the long-standing assumption that early modern conceptions of race were radically different in their fluidity from post-Enlightenment ones by demonstrating how many of the debates we continue to have about the nature of racial identity were engendered by these seventeenth-century performances.

Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference

Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference PDF Author: Patricia Akhimie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351125028
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference reveals the relationship between racial discrimination and the struggle for upward social mobility in the early modern world. Reading Shakespeare’s plays alongside contemporaneous conduct literature - how-to books on self-improvement - this book demonstrates the ways that the pursuit of personal improvement was accomplished by the simultaneous stigmatization of particular kinds of difference. The widespread belief that one could better, or cultivate, oneself through proper conduct was coupled with an equally widespread belief that certain markers (including but not limited to "blackness"), indicated an inability to conduct oneself properly, laying the foundation for what we now call "racism." A careful reading of Shakespeare’s plays reveals a recurring critique of the conduct system voiced, for example, by malcontents and social climbers like Iago and Caliban, and embodied in the struggles of earnest strivers like Othello, Bottom, Dromio of Ephesus, and Dromio of Syracuse, whose bodies are bruised, pinched, blackened, and otherwise indelibly marked as uncultivatable. By approaching race through the discourse of conduct, this volume not only exposes the epistemic violence toward stigmatized others that lies at the heart of self-cultivation, but also contributes to the broader definition of race that has emerged in recent studies of cross-cultural encounter, colonialism, and the global early modern world.