Chapter 2. Time Boundaries and Time Shifts in Early Modern Literary Studies

2020 ◽  
pp. 36-52
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Studies

Coda

2019 ◽  
pp. 225-228
Author(s):  
David Hershinow
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Political History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
Truth Teller

In this book, I have tried to show that it is only with the rise of dramatic realism that the figure of the Cynic truth-teller begins to provoke sustained interpretive crisis, a crisis that takes shape in the sixteenth century and that goes on to drive key developments in our literary, philosophical and political history. Through my readings of Shakespeare’s plays, I have also tried to show that literature – along with its academic offspring, literary criticism – is uniquely positioned to diagnose the interpretive errors that consequently underwrite philosophical and political ideas about the means of achieving extreme critical agency. What these two overarching aims have in common is the critical methodology I develop in order to advance them, and I conclude this book by briefly commenting on the value this method holds for early modern studies in particular and for the discipline of literary studies in general....

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Tracey A. Sowerby ◽  
Joanna Craigwood
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
The Core ◽  
Theoretical Import

The Introduction outlines the inter-penetration of literary and diplomatic cultures within European and some non-European diplomatic practices, emphasizing the wide-ranging and sophisticated ways in which early modern diplomats utilized literary motifs. It introduces readers to existing research within the emerging field of diplo-literary studies and those areas of the ‘new diplomatic history’ which are most pertinent to the core thematic focus of the collection. While situating contributions within this literature, it also outlines the collective methodological and theoretical import of the volume. Paying particular attention to literary representations of diplomacy, diplomacy, and translation, the diplomatic dissemination of texts, and the texts used in diplomatic practice, it draws out a series of findings for the field.

“We are of the Sea!”

2015 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-201
Author(s):  
Laurie Ellinghausen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Religion And Nationalism

The figure of the renegade has been widely discussed in the field of early modern literary studies, with scholars situating rogue behavior within discourses of race, religion, and nationalism. However, these perspectives have not adequately addressed how domestic discourses of class and labor also shaped representations of renegades. My paper fills this gap by paying particular attention to English anxieties about vagrancy, a domestic phenomenon that manifested itself in new forms abroad, among pirates, apostates, and other traitors operating outside the geographical boundaries of the English state. Specifically, I examine the figure of Captain John Ward in Robert Daborne’s play A Christian Turned Turk (pub. 1612), in order to demonstrate previously overlooked connections between Ward’s reputation and his actual background as a lowly fisherman and conscripted sailor. This paper, by closely examining how the play and its sources construct Ward as a masterless man, sheds new light on the neglected issues of class and labor in the construction of the early modern English renegade.

The Hurt(ful) Body

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Art History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Dialectical Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theatre Studies

This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. It has a sustained focus on visual sources, textual material and documents about actual events rather than well-known thinkers or ‘masterpieces’ of art history, and a preference for cases and historical contexts over systematic theory-building. The hurt(ful) body brings under discussion visual and performative representations of embodied pain, using an insistently dialectical approach that takes into account the perspective of the hurt body itself, the power and afflictions of its beholder and, finally, the routinising and redeeming of hurt within institutional contexts. The volume’s two-fold approach of the hurt body, defining ‘hurt’ both from the perspective of the victim and the beholder (as well as their combined creation of a gaze), is unique. It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of ‘cruel’ viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims’ bodies, and confronting them to the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings, and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victim’s presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look – the transmitted ‘pain’ experienced by the watching audience. This will be done through three rubrics: the early modern performing body, beholder or audience responses, and the operations of institutional power. Because of its interdisciplinary approach of the history of pain and the hurt(ful) body, the book will be of interest for Lecturers and students from different fields, like the history of ideas, the history of the body, urban history, theatre studies, literary studies, art history, emotion studies and performance studies

Mistranslation, Unsettlement, La Navidad

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (4) ◽  
pp. 938-946
Author(s):  
Anna Brickhouse
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Christopher Columbus ◽  
San Salvador ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
European Colonization

On 14 october 1492, on the island that he had just named San Salvador, Christopher Columbus Seized Seven TaÍno indians to serve as translators. The abduction was clearly an act of significant forethought, registering Columbus's intention that these interpreters “inquire and inform … about things in these parts” (Columbus, “Tetter” 118)—a first step toward the subjugation of all the inhabitants of San Salvador, who might one day be “taken to Castile or held captive” on the island (Columbus, Diario 75). The taking of these indigenous translators has been no less momentous for contemporary scholarship, perhaps especially in early modern English and American literary studies: in the year of the Columbian quincentenary, Stephen Greenblatt memorably called it “the primal crime in the New World … committed in the interest of language” (24); Eric Cheyfitz concurs that “translation was, and still is, the central act of European colonization and imperialism in the Americas” (104). Yet the concept of translation as a wholly imperial instrument, as commonplace in Columbus's day as in our own, has limited our thinking in important ways (Adorno, “Polemics” 20). As ethnohistorians and literary critics alike have suggested, the interpretive sway of the “linguistic colonialism” model can obscure as much about its Native objects as it reveals about the purported discursive complexity of its European subjects.

The Spectacle of Care: From Figure to Form

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Figures Of Speech ◽  
Renaissance Studies ◽  
Relative Neglect ◽  
Aesthetic Principle

The introduction provides a concise account of the widespread popularity of figures of speech in early modern literature as well as the humanist schoolrooms in which both writers and readers were trained to recognize and wield these instruments of ornamentation. It suggests that the relative neglect of figures of speech within histories of style as well as Renaissance studies more broadly speaks to literary studies’ quiet internalization of the very aesthetic principle against which poets like Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth worked: that good art pretends to be made up of something other than artifice. It argues that a poetic theory that takes seriously experiments with artifice at its most conspicuous challenges us to revise our accounts of literary world-making. Rather than understanding conspicuous artifice as a violation of decorum and verisimilitude, it shows how the indecorous thinking of figures of speech established the parameters of possibility for poetry’s privileged domain of “what may be.” Finally, it argues for a revaluation of the concept of form in literary studies from the perspective of figures of speech.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 203-208
Author(s):  
Katherine R. Larson
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Critical Inquiry ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Digital Initiative ◽  
Women’S Writing

The Epilogue presents two central conclusions: (1) that song is a slippery and multidimensional form that demands to be considered in embodied, gendered, and performance-based terms, and (2) that song constituted a vital, and vitally charged, rhetorical medium for women writers, performers, and patrons in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Epilogue also open up future areas of critical inquiry, both in relation to early modern women’s writing and literary studies more broadly. In particular, it introduces Early Modern Songscapes, an emergent collaborative and interdisciplinary digital initiative that is responding directly to the methodological questions raised by The Matter of Song in Early Modern England.

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