The Optimism of Infidelity

Queer Faith ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 157-199
Author(s):  
Melissa E. Sanchez
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Sexual Liberation ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Love Letter ◽  
Cultural Project ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter argues that whereas in modern thought secularism appears the only route to challenging lifelong monogamous marriage, the early modern writers John Milton, Philip Sidney, and Mary Wroth base their endorsement of divorce and adultery on the Pauline distinction between duty and love, letter and spirit. Milton’s divorce pamphlets and Sidney’s and Wroth’s sonnet sequences presume that any given commitment may turn out to be a mistake, so intimacy is inevitably provisional. In their emphasis on interiority, these writers participate in a cultural project of privatizing love, which scholars have rightly seen as an ideological foundation of heteronormativity, capitalism, and neoliberalism. Yet by taking this privatization to its logical extreme, they provide grounds for removing intimacy from institutional regulation and reward altogether. These writings are useful to modern queer thought not just as positive models, but also because they alert us to the exclusions upon which freedom may be premised. Sidney, Wroth, and Milton are part of the longer history that precedes and conditions present queer associations of secularism with Western reason and modernity, religion with superstitious and oppressive non-Western cultures. The ideal of sexual liberation, no less than those of monogamy and marriage, has its own racialized genealogy.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Borris
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
John Milton ◽  
English Literature ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Perceived Importance ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Poetic Practice ◽  
Authorial Persona

Before surveying the book’s argument, the Introduction contextualizes Spenser’s Platonic interests in relation to current trends and debates in literary studies and in Spenser studies. It further considers the relevant aspects of early modern thought and culture, including Plato’s perceived importance for discursive pursuits of the sublime, his Elizabethan status, how Spenser likely encountered Platonism as a schoolboy taught by Richard Mulcaster, its currency in the poet’s circle in the 1570s, and which Platonic texts are most pertinent to him. The interaction of Platonic poetics with Elizabethan poetic practice transformed the creative horizons of English literature. While newly assessing this aspect of Spenser’s poesis, the book as a whole clarifies the development of early modern continental and English poetics, this writer’s poetics, his visionary aspirations, his major poems, and his authorial persona. Spenser had a foundational role in the English literary “line of vision” that includes John Milton and William Blake among others.

The Folly of the Cross

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Viladesau
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Theology Of The Cross ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Satisfaction Model

This work surveys the ways in which theologians, artists, and composers of the early modern period dealt with the passion and death of Christ. The fourth volume in a series, it locates the theology of the cross in the context of modern thought, beginning with the Enlightenment, which challenged traditional Christian notions of salvation and of Christ himself. It shows how new models of salvation were proposed by liberal theology, replacing the older “satisfaction” model with theories of Christ as bringer of God’s spirit and as social revolutionary. It shows how the arts during this period both preserved the classical tradition and responded to innovations in theology and in style.

Staging Romance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Publicover
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Spatial Grammar ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter explores the mostly overlooked history of romance on the early modern stage. Analysing the geographies of two little-known plays, Clyomon and Clamydes (1580s?) and Guy of Warwick (early 1590s?), it argues that, in its imaginative openness and its flexible staging of space, the early modern theatre was the ideal environment in which to stage romance’s extravagant spatial and ethnographical imaginings. Further, the chapter demonstrates how a theatrical tradition of clowning enabled these late-Elizabethan dramas to contest the values of the very romance-worlds they had established. It closes with a fresh reading of Francis Beaumont’s parody of romance, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, arguing that the play satirizes dramatic romance’s spatial grammar as well as its narrative strategies.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
First Century ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Metaphysics Of Time ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Impact

This Conclusion draws the study to a close, and recounts its developmental theses. The first thesis is that the complexity of positions on time (and space) defended in early modern thought is hugely under-appreciated. An enormous variety of positions were defended during this period, going far beyond the well-known absolutism–relationism debate. The second thesis is that during this period three distinct kinds of absolutism can be found in British philosophy: Morean, Gassendist, and Newtonian. The chapter concludes with a few notes on the impact of absolutism within and beyond philosophy: on twenty-first-century metaphysics of time; and on art, geology, and philosophical theology.

scholarly journals Brother-Sister Relationships in Early Modern Drama

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Salim E. Al-Ibia ◽  
Ruth M.E. Oldman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Personal Interest ◽  
Love Affair ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Sister Relationship ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Measure For Measure ◽  
Sister Relationships ◽  
The Ideal

This study aims to evaluate the commodified brother-sister relationship in Early Modern drama. It examines three different samples from three major playwrights of this time period: Isabella and Claudio in William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1603), Charles and Susan in Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), and Giovanni and Annabella in John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1632). The three aforementioned cases are closely evaluated through a Marxist-feminist lens. The study finds out that the brothers in the three examined plays are not very different since they all encourage their sisters to sacrifice their chastity to achieve some sort of personal interest. Interestingly enough, the sisters vary in their responses to their brothers’ requests of offering their bodies to help their brothers. Obviously, Shakespeare offers the ideal version of a sister who does everything in her power to save a brother. Yet, she refuses to offer her body in return to his freedom in spite of her brother’s desperate calls to offer her virginity to Angelo to save the former’s life. Susan of Heywood is also similar to Isabella of Shakespeare since she refuses to sell herself in return to the money needed to save her brother. However, Ford offers the ugliest version of a brother-sister relationship. The brother wants to have a love affair with his sister who yields to his sexual advances and eventually gets pregnant.

Reviews: Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in, the Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography, the Puritan Millenium: Literature and Theology, 1550–1682, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism, Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822, Letters from Revolutionary France, the Victorian Working-Class Writer, Representations of Childhood Death, Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque, Women's Leisure in England, 1920–60KingJohn N., Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. xx + 227, £42.50.LewalskiBarbara K., The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography , Blackwell, 2000, pp. xvii + 777, illustrated, £25.00.GribbenCrawford, The Puritan Millenium: Literature and Theology, 1550–1682 , Four Courts Press, 2000, pp. 219, £39.50; PooleKristen, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England , Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. xiii + 257, £40.DartGregory, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism , Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. xi + 288, £37.50.ShawPhilip (ed.), Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822 , Ashgate, 2000, pp. xii + 233, £45.TenchWatkin, Letters from Revolutionary France , ed. Gavin Edwards, University of Wales Press, 2001, pp. xxxviii + 186, £20.00, £9.99 pb.AshtonOwen and RobertsStephen, The Victorian Working-Class Writer , Cassell, 1999, pp. viii + 164, £45; HaywoodIan (ed.), Chartist Fiction , Ashgate, 1999, pp. xv + 200, £40.AveryGillian and ReynoldsKimberley (eds), Representations of Childhood Death , Macmillan, 2000, pp. 246, £45; DeverCarolyn, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins , Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 233, £35.TroddColin, BarlowPaul and AmigoniDavid (eds), Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque , Ashgate Press, 1999, pp. xiv + 212, £47.50.LanghamerClaire, Women's Leisure in England, 1920–60 , Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. xi + 220, £15.99 pb.

2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-122
Author(s):  
Thomas N. Corns ◽  
Ivan Roots ◽  
Newton Key ◽  
Irene Collins ◽  
Philip W. Martin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Religious Controversy ◽  
Childhood Death ◽  
Literature And Theology ◽  
The Grotesque

scholarly journals Gayatri Spivak leitora de Paradise Lost: um texto transdisciplinar

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-119
Author(s):  
Luiz Fernando Ferreira Sá
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Gayatri Spivak

Resumo: Em Paradise Lost, de John Milton, épico e império se encontram dissociados. Contrário a muitas leituras tradicionais, essa escrita do início da Era Moderna inglesa intersecta o pensamento pós-colonial de várias maneiras. Ao usar o circuito pós-colonial de teoria e prática textual de Gayatri Spivak, este artigo desenvolve uma desleitura em contraponto desse texto de Milton: Paradise Lost poderá finalmente libertar-se de seu conteúdo colonial e liberar seu conteúdo pós-colonial.Palavras-chave: Gayatri Spivak; pós-colonialismo; John Milton.Abstract: In John Milton’s Paradise Lost epic and empire are dissociated. Contrary to many misreadings,32 this all-important writing of the English Early Modern Age intersects postcolonial thinking in a number of ways. By using Gayatri Spivak’s circuit of postcolonial theory and practice, this article enacts a contrapuntal (mis)reading of Milton’s text: Paradise Lost may at last free its (post)colonial (dis)content.Keywords: Gayatri Spivak; postcolonialism; John Milton.

The Longue Durée of Deathbed Rites

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline I. Stone
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Buddhist Temple ◽  
Kamakura Period ◽  
Funeral Practices ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
The Ideal

During the Kamakura period and beyond, deathbed practices spread to new social groups. The ideal of mindful death was accommodated to warriors heading for the battlefield and was incorporated into war tales. It was reinterpreted in emergent Zen communities by such figures as Enni, Soseki, and Koken Shiren; within the exclusive nenbutsu movements, by Hōnen, Shinran, Shinkyō, and others; and by Shingon adepts such as Kakukai, Dōhan, Chidō, and others who advocated simplified forms of A-syllable contemplation (ajikan) as a deathbed practice naturally according with innate enlightenment. Amid the thriving print culture of early modern times, new ōjōden and instructions for deathbed practice were compiled and published. These often show a pronounced sectarian orientation, reflecting Buddhist temple organization under Tokugawa rule; they also reveal much about contemporaneous funeral practices. Deathbed practices declined markedly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a casualty of modernity and changing afterlife conceptions.

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