Samson’s Cords

Samson’s Cords PDF Author: Alex Garganigo
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 148750098X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Samson's Cords examines the radically different responses of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Samuel Butler to the existential crises caused by an explosion of loyalty oaths in Britain before and after 1660.

Samson’s Cords

Samson’s Cords PDF Author: Alex Garganigo
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 148750098X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Samson's Cords examines the radically different responses of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Samuel Butler to the existential crises caused by an explosion of loyalty oaths in Britain before and after 1660.

Raising Their Voices

Raising Their Voices PDF Author: Marilyn L. Williamson
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814322093
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description


The Pious Sex

The Pious Sex PDF Author: Andrea Radasanu
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739131060
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
The Pious Sex strives to enlighten the reader with respect to the relationship between women and religion. The notion that there is a special relationship between women and piety may call to mind the worst of the prejudices associated with women over the ages: the characterization of women as superstitious and inherently irrational creatures who must be kept firmly in hand by the patriarchal establishment. The suggestion that there is a special relationship between women and piety conjures up the most oppressive picture of womanly virtue. The contributors of this volume revisit the claim that women constitute the pious sex and investigate the implications of such a designation. This collection of original essays examines the relationship between women and religion in the history of political thought broadly conceived. This theme is a remarkably revealing lens through which to view the Western philosophical and poetical traditions that have culminated in secular and egalitarian modern society. The essays also give highly analytical accounts of the manifold and intricate relationships between religion, family, and public life in the history of political thought, and the various ways in which these relationships have manifested themselves in pagan, Jewish, Christian, and post-Christian settings.

Players' Scepters

Players' Scepters PDF Author: Susan Staves
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description


Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage

Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage PDF Author: Cynthia Lowenthal
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809324620
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
In Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage, Cynthia Lowenthal explores identity--especially masculinity and femininity, English and "foreign," middle-class and aristocratic--as it is enacted, idealized, deployed, and redefined on the late-seventeenth-century British stage. Particular emphasis is placed on the ways the theatre contributed to new and often shifting early modern definitions of the boundaries of nation, status, and gender. The first portion of the book focuses on the playwrights' presentations of idealized men and the comic ridicule of male bodies and behaviors that fall short of the ideal. Of special interest are those moments when playwrights use stereotypes of national character, particularly the Spaniards and Turks, as examples of the worst in male behavior, judgments that are always inflected with elements of class or status inconsistency. The second portion of Lowenthal's discussion focuses on playwrights' attempts to redefine the idealized woman. Lowenthal investigates the ways that an extratheatrical discourse surrounding the actresses, one that essentialized them as sexual bodies demanding scrutiny and requiring containment, also serves to secure for them an equally essential aristocratic status. Anchored by Manley's Royal Mischief, Lowenthal's reading reveals that even a woman playwright's attempts to represent female subjectivity or interiority at odds with the surfaces of the body are doomed to return to those same surfaces. By focusing on a new, early modern lability of identity and by reading less canonical women playwrights, such as Manley and Pix, alongside established male playwrights such as Dryden and Wycherley, Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage yields both a more accurate and a more compelling picture of the cultural dynamics at work on the early modern stage.

The Critical Fortunes of Aphra Behn

The Critical Fortunes of Aphra Behn PDF Author: Janet Todd
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571131652
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
This is the first study of the posthumous life of Aphra Behn, the extraordinary vicissitudes of her critical reception, and the personal vilifications of her reputation through three centuries. Beginning with the reception of Behn's work during her lifetime, which she herself helped to orchestrate by performing herself as a seductive woman, a beleaguered lady writer, and a serious intellectual, among other roles, the work ends with the late 20th-century reception of Behn, when the interest in gender, race, and class has made of her almost a postmodern writer. In the 17th century she was seen as a playwright of sexy and propagandist comedies, and attacked by those who disapproved her supposedly unfeminine stance and her royalist politics. Later, as the Restoration period itself fell into disrepute, Behn's plays were denigrated along with those of her fellow men, but greater opprobrium fell on her as a woman, because in the 19th century it was felt that a female writer should have higher morals than a man. During this period, Behn's reputation was exceedingly low, while her short story Oroonoko gained acclaim, freed from any association with its author or her supposedly squalid times. In the 18th and 19th centuries Oroonoko moved from being viewed as political commentary and heroic romance to a sentimental tale of doomed love and then an abolitionist text. In the early twentieth century it was hailed as one of the earliest realist texts, part of the great English ascent into the novel. JANET TODD is professor of English at the University of East Anglia

Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760

Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760 PDF Author: Diane Purkiss
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134938942
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
The shared aim of these important new critical interventions into the early modern period is to make fresh feminist attempts to uncover the writings of Elizabethan and Jacobean women. Subject to silence, censorship and manipulation in the terms of overriding political concerns of the day, the feminist history of the early modern period is still a largely unwritten story. New feminist analysis can expose the conditions of production in which the history of the period was constructed: this revealing new Collection thereby exposes the untold stories which underpin the official texts. By beginning to explore this period from women's point of view, Women, Texts and Histories shows the crucial and fascinating ways in which women's writing may undermine many of the received assumptions on which the history of the period has depended.

Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism

Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism PDF Author: Dr Gaby Mahlberg
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472404122
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism takes stock of developments in the scholarship of seventeenth-century English republicanism by looking at the movements and schools of thought that have shaped the field over the decades: the linguistic turn, the cultural turn and the religious turn. While scholars of seventeenth-century republicanism share their enthusiasm for their field, they have approached their subject in diverse ways. The contributors to the present volume have taken the opportunity to bring these approaches together in a number of case studies covering republican language, republican literary and political culture, and republican religion, to paint a lively picture of the state of the art in republican scholarship. The volume begins with three chapters influenced by the theory and methodology of the linguistic turn, before moving on to address cultural history approaches to English republicanism, including both literary culture and (practical) political culture. The final section of the volume looks at how religion intersected with ideas of republican thought. Taken together the essays demonstrate the vitality and diversity of what was once regarded as a narrow topic of political research.

Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth Century Theatre

Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth Century Theatre PDF Author: P.A. Skantze
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134447264
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth Century Theatre provides a comprehensive examination of this aesthetic theory. The author investigates this aesthetic history as a form of artistic creation, philosophical investigation, a way of representing and manipulating ideas about gender and a way of acknowledging, reinforcing and making a critique of social values for the still and moving, the permanent and elapsing. The book's analysis covers the entire seventeenth-century with chapters on the work of Ben Jonson, John Milton, the pamphletheatre, Aphra Behn, John Vanbrugh and Jeremy Collier and will be of interest to scholars in the areas of literary and performance studies.

The Theater of Experiment

The Theater of Experiment PDF Author: Al Coppola
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190269723
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The first book-length study of the relationship between science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment explores the crucial role of spectacle in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was "staged" in a double sense. On the one hand, this study analyzes science in performance: the way that science and scientists were made a public spectacle in comedies, farces, and pantomimes for purposes that could range from the satiric to the pedagogic to the hagiographic. But this book also considers the way in which these plays laid bare science as performance: that is, the way that eighteenth-century science was itself a kind of performing art, subject to regimes of stagecraft that traversed the laboratory, the lecture hall, the anatomy theater, and the public stage. Not only did the representation of natural philosophy in eighteenth-century plays like Thomas Shadwell's Virtuoso, Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon, Susanna Centlivre's The Basset Table, and John Rich's Necromancer, or Harelequin Doctor Faustus, influence contemporary debates over the role that experimental science was to play public life, the theater shaped the very form that science itself was to take. By disciplining, and ultimately helping to legitimate, experimental philosophy, the eighteenth-century stage helped to naturalize an epistemology based on self-evident, decontextualized facts that might speak for themselves. In this, the stage and the lab jointly fostered an Enlightenment culture of spectacle that transformed the conditions necessary for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Precisely because Enlightenment public science initiatives, taking their cue from the public stages, came to embrace the stagecraft and spectacle that Restoration natural philosophy sought to repress from the scene of experimental knowledge production, eighteenth-century science organized itself around not the sober, masculine "modest witness" of experiment but the sentimental, feminized, eager observer of scientific performance.