The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Species Interaction ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
First Century ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Reference Guide ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theatrical Practice ◽  
Material Conditions

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy offers critical, contemporary resources for studying Shakespeare’s comic enterprises. It engages with perennial but still urgent questions raised by the comedies, looking at them from a range of new perspectives that represent the most recent methodological approaches to Shakespeare, genre, and early modern drama. Some essays take up firmly established topics of inquiry—Shakespeare’s source materials, gender and sexuality, hetero- and homoerotic desire, race, religion—and reformulate them in the kinds of materialist, formalist, phenomenological, or revisionist terms of current scholarship and critical debate. Others explore subjects—ecology, cross-species interaction, humoral theory—that have only relatively recently become pressing concerns for sustained scholarly interrogation. Still others, informed by increasingly sophisticated approaches to the material conditions and embodied experience of theatrical practice, speak to a resurgence of interest in performance, from Shakespeare’s period through the first decades of the twenty-first century. And others investigate distinct sets of plays from unexpected and often polemical angles, noting connections between the comedies under inventive, unpredicted banners such as the theology of adultery, early modern pedagogy, global exploration, or monarchical rule. Since the Handbook situates these approaches against the long history of scholarship on the comedies, it both provides a valuable reference guide and represents some of the most up-to-date work in the field.

Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Latina/o Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 147-174
Author(s):  
Alicia Arrizón
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Knowledge ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
First Century ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Gender And Sexuality Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Methodological Considerations

This article begins delving into the intersectionality of the conceptual knowledge embedded in the terms “women,” “gender,” and “sexuality.” The evolution of these three concepts has transformed the field of women, gender, and sexuality studies. While drawing on feminist and interdisciplinary methods to center on women’s issues, the field examines constructs of gender power relations, systems of oppression, and privilege. Students and scholars in the field examine these concepts as they intersect with other identities and social sites such as race, sexual orientation, inequality, class, and disability. The article begins with a general examination of the epistemological inquires considered in the title. It then traces the interdisciplinarity of women’s studies and feminist theory while contextualizing Latina feminism within Third World feminisms as conceptualized in the twentieth century. The article also argues that in Latina/o culture, the epistemology of these terms is reinforced by the power of heterosexuality, patriarchy, and the ramifications of colonial history. In this framework, the article examines the dichotomy of marianismo and machismo as markers of the legacy of colonialism. In what contexts this legacy influences Latina feminist discourses and views in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? What type of genealogies have been fundamental in tracing the colonial history of Latina/American feminism across borders? What kinds of methodological considerations for studying sexuality, and non-conforming gendering processes in Latina/o/Latinx culture in the twenty-first century are currently relevant? Are Latinas becoming more visible and influential in the twenty-first century? These inquiries are considered important for engaging with contemporary issues in Latino/a studies.

Flora Unveiled

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lincoln Taiz ◽  
Lee Taiz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Neolithic Period ◽  
Pollination Mechanisms ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sexual Theory ◽  
The One

Sex in animals has been known for at least ten thousand years, and this knowledge was exploited during animal domestication in the Neolithic period. In contrast, sex in plants wasn’t discovered until the late seventeenth century. Even after its discovery, the sexual “theory” continued to be hotly debated for another 150 years, pitting the “sexualists” against the “asexualists.” Why was the idea of sex in plants so contentious for so long? In answer, Flora Unveiled offers a deep history of perceptions concerning plant gender and sexuality, from the Paleolithic to the nineteenth century. Evidence suggests that an obstacle far beyond the mere facts of pollination mechanisms stymied the discovery of two sexes in plants, and then delayed its acceptance. This was a “plants-as-female” paradigm. Flora Unveiled explores the sources of this gender bias, beginning with women’s roles as gatherers, plant-textile makers, crop domesticators, and early horticulturists. In myths and religions of the Bronze and Iron Ages, goddesses were strongly identified with flowers, trees and agricultural abundance. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, this tradition was assimilated to Christianity in the person of Mary. The one-sex model of plants continued into the Early Modern Period, and staged resurgences during the eighteenth century Enlightenment and in the Romantic movement. Not until the nineteenth century, when Wilhelm Hofmeister demonstrated the universality of sex in the plant kingdom, was the controversy over plant sex finally resolved. Flora Unveiled chronicles how persistently cultural biases can impede discovery and delay the acceptance of scientific advances.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Victoria Van Hyning
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth

The Introduction maps the landscape of the early modern English convents in exile, and situates the literature of the nuns of St Monica’s and Nazareth within a broader history of monastic literature and culture, medieval to modern, with emphasis on the period shortly after the Reformation, through to the late eighteenth century. The case studies at the heart of the subsequent five chapters are briefly outlined, and reveal a broad range of literary styles and motifs spanning epistolary, chorographical, confessional, and devotional expression, by anonymous as well as named authors. This section introduces the concepts of anonymous and subsumed autobiography, which trouble the still well established, if deeply contested, definitions of autobiography propounded by Philippe Lejeune. These new genres are informed by scholarship of the late twentieth and twenty-first century, devoted to the subjects of women’s writing, and autobiography, self- or life-writing.

Early Modern Theatricality

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
First Century ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Original Essays ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Rich ◽  
New Generation

The original essays inOxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literaturemean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate. Following the models established by previous volumes in the series,Early Modern Theatricalitylaunches a new generation of scholarship on early modern drama by focusing on the rich formal capacities of theatrical performance. The collection gathers some of the most innovative critics in the field to examine the techniques, objects, bodies, and conventions that characterized early modern theatricality, from the Tudor period to the Restoration. Taking their cues from a series of guiding keywords, the contributors identify the fundamental features of theatricality in the period, using them to launch conceptually adventurous arguments that provoke our rediscovery of early modern drama in all its complexity and inventiveness.

The Innocence of Pontius Pilate

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lloyd Dusenbury
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
First Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
History Of Empire

The gospels and ancient historians agree: Jesus was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate, the Roman imperial prefect in Jerusalem. To this day, Christians of all churches confess that Jesus died 'under Pontius Pilate'. But what exactly does that mean? Within decades of Jesus' death, Christians began suggesting that it was the Judaean authorities who had crucified Jesus—a notion later echoed in the Qur'an. In the third century, one philosopher raised the notion that, although Pilate had condemned Jesus, he'd done so justly; this idea survives in one of the main strands of modern New Testament criticism. So what is the truth of the matter? And what is the history of that truth? David Lloyd Dusenbury reveals Pilate's 'innocence' as not only a neglected theological question, but a recurring theme in the history of European political thought. He argues that Jesus' interrogation by Pilate, and Augustine of Hippo's African sermon on that trial, led to the concept of secularity and the logic of tolerance emerging in early modern Europe. Without the Roman trial of Jesus, and the arguments over Pilate's innocence, the history of empire—from the first century to the twenty-first—would have been radically different.

American Vampires

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Convention ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter charts the American vampire narrative through four stages: 1) a ‘pre-history’ of its American origins; 2) the legacy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in early twentieth-century American literary and cinematic adaptations; 3) the proliferation of vampire narratives via their increasing celebration of the vampire as hero liberated from social convention and embodying post-Watergate scepticism of authority; and 4) twenty-first-century representations whose ironic humanization of the vampire contest hegemonic structures of race, gender, and sexuality.

Stages of Loss

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Oppitz-Trotman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Material Wealth ◽  
Northern European ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Theatrical Practice ◽  
European Theatre ◽  
First Time

Stages of Loss supplies an original and deeply researched account of travel and festivity in early modern Europe, complicating, revising, and sometimes entirely rewriting received accounts of the emergence and development of professional theatre. It offers a history of English actors travelling and performing abroad in early modern Europe, and Germany in particular, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These players, known as English Comedians, were among the first professional actors to perform in central and northern European courts and cities. The vital contributions made by them to the development of a European theatre institution have long been neglected. They are here introduced in their proper contexts for the first time. Stages of Loss explores connections real and perceived between diminishments of national value and the material wealth transported by itinerant players; representations of loss, waste, and profligacy within the drama they performed; and the extent to which theatrical practice and the process of canonization have led to archival and interpretive losses in theatre history. Situating the English Comedians in a variety of economic, social, religious, and political contexts, it explores trends and continuities in the reception of their itinerant theatre, showing how their incorporation into modern theatre history has been shaped by derogatory assessments of travelling theatre and itinerant people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Stages of Loss reveals that the Western theatre institution took shape partly as a means of accommodating, controlling, evaluating, and concealing the work of migrant strangers.

Intersectionality and Marxism: A Critical Historiography

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley Bohrer
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
First Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Critical Historiography ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractIn recent years, there has been renewed interest in conceptualising the relationship between oppression and capitalism as well as intense debate over the precise nature of this relationship. No doubt spurred on by the financial crisis, it has become increasingly clear that capitalism, both historically and in the twenty-first century, has had particularly devastating effects for women and people of colour. Intersectionality, which emerged in the late twentieth century as a way of addressing the relationship between race, gender, sexuality and class, has submitted orthodox Marxism to critique for its inattention to the complex dynamics of various social locations; in turn Marxist thinkers in the twenty-first century have engaged with intersectionality, calling attention to the impoverished notion of class and capitalism on which it relies. As intersectionality constitutes perhaps the most common way that contemporary activists and theorists on the left conceive of identity politics, an analysis of intersectionality’s relationship to Marxism is absolutely crucial for historical materialists to understand and consider. This paper looks at the history of intersectionality’s and Marxism’s critiques of one another in order to ground a synthesis of the two frameworks. It argues that in the twenty-first century, we need a robust, Marxist analysis of capitalism, and that the only robust account of capitalism is one articulated intersectionally, one which treats class, race, gender and sexuality as fundamental to capitalist accumulation.

Vampiros Mexicanos

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Borgia
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
First Century ◽  
State Governments ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lgbt Movement ◽  
Conflicting Messages ◽  
Twilight Series ◽  
The Catholic Church

This chapter contrasts best-selling and critically acclaimed twenty-first century Mexican novels about vampires, exploring their conflicting messages about gender and sexuality and comparing this continuum to the history of vampire literature in English and its contemporary influences, such as the Twilight series. It argues that the recent surge of vampire novels in Mexico stems from contemporary struggles to redefine gender and sexuality in the wake of the country’s legalization of abortion in the capital, its LGBT movement, and the strong mandates of the Catholic Church and state governments. The examples of Vampyr (2009) by Carolina Andújar, Amantes de Sangre (2009) by Ramón Obón and La sed (2001) by Adriana DíazEnciso illustrate both the dominant conservative discourses on sexuality and the more recent acceptance of previously marginalized behaviors and identities.

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