Download or read book Archaic Style in English Literature 1590 1674 written by Lucy Munro and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-28 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Munro explores the conscious use of archaic language by poets and dramatists including Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson and Milton.
Download or read book Shakespeare Unlearned written by Adam Zucker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare Unlearned dances along the borderline of sense and nonsense in early modern texts, revealing overlooked opportunities for understanding and shared community in words and ideas that might in the past have been considered too silly to matter much for serious scholarship. Each chapter pursues a self-knowing, gently ironic study of the lexicon and scripting of words and acts related to what has been called 'stupidity' in work by Shakespeare and other authors. Each centers significant, often comic situations that emerge -- on stage, in print, and in the critical and editorial tradition pertaining to the period -- when rigorous scholars and teachers meet language, characters, or plotlines that exceed, and at times entirely undermine, the goals and premises of scholarly rigor. Each suggests that a framing of putative 'stupidity' pursued through lexicography, editorial glossing, literary criticism, and pedagogical practice can help us put Shakespeare and semantically obscure historical literature more generally to new communal ends. Words such as 'baffle' in Twelfth Night or 'twangling' and 'jingling' in The Tempest, and characters such as Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Holofernes the pedant, might in the past have been considered unworthy of critical attention -- too light or obvious to matter much for our understanding of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Adam Zucker's meditation on the limits of learnedness and the opportunities presented by a philology of stupidity argues otherwise.
Download or read book The Elizabethan Top Ten written by Emma Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging with histories of the book and of reading, as well as with studies of material culture, this volume explores ’popularity’ in early modern English writings. Is ’popular’ best described as a theoretical or an empirical category in this period? How can we account for the gap between modern canonicity and early modern print popularity? How might we weight the evidence of popularity from citations, serial editions, print runs, reworkings, or extant copies? Is something that sells a lot always popular, even where the readership for print is only a small proportion of the population, or does popular need to carry something of its etymological sense of the public, the people? Four initial chapters sketch out the conceptual and evidential issues, while the second part of the book consists of ten short chapters-a ’hit parade’- in which eminent scholars take a genre or a single exemplar - play, romance, sermon, or almanac, among other categories-as a means to articulate more general issues. Throughout, the aim is to unpack and interrogate assumptions about the popular, and to decentre canonical narratives about, for example, the sermons of Donne or Andrewes over Smith, or the plays of Shakespeare over Mucedorus. Revisiting Elizabethan literary culture through the lenses of popularity, this collection allows us to view the subject from an unfamiliar angle-in which almanacs are more popular than sonnets and proclamations more numerous than plays, and in which authors familiar to us are displaced by names now often forgotten.
Download or read book Shakespeare s World of Words written by Paul Yachnin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was Shakespeare really the original genius he has appeared to be since the eighteenth century, a poet whose words came from nature itself? The contributors to this volume propose that Shakespeare was not the poet of nature, but rather that he is a genius of rewriting and re-creation, someone able to generate a new language and new ways of seeing the world by orchestrating existing social and literary vocabularies. Each chapter in the volume begins with a key word or phrase from Shakespeare and builds toward a broader consideration of the social, poetic, and theatrical dimensions of his language. The chapters capture well the richness of Shakespeare's world of words by including discussions of biblical language, Latinity, philosophy of language and subjectivity, languages of commerce, criminality, history, and education, the gestural vocabulary of performance, as well as accounts of verbal modality and Shakespeare's metrics. An Afterword outlines a number of other important languages in Shakespeare, including those of law, news, and natural philosophy.
Download or read book Nostalgia in the Early Modern World written by Harriet Lyon and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can the concept of nostalgia illuminate the culturally specific ways in which societies understand the contested relationship between the past, present, and future? The word nostalgia was invented in the late seventeenth century to describe the debilitating effects of homesickness. Now widely defined as a sense of longing for a lost past, initially it was more closely linked with dislocation in space. By exploring some of its many textual, visual and musical manifestations in the tumultuous period between c. 1350 and 1800, this volume resists the assumption that nostalgia is a distinctive by-product of modernity. It also forges a fruitful link between three lively areas of current scholarly enquiry: memory, temporality, and emotion. The contributors deploy nostalgia as a tool for investigating perceptions of the passage of time and historical change, unsettling experiences of migration and geographical displacement, and the connections between remembering and forgetting, affect and imagination. Ranging across Europe and the Atlantic world, they examine the moments, sites and communities in which it arose, alongside how it was used to express both criticism and regret about the religious, political, social and cultural upheavals that shaped the early modern world. They approach it as a complex mixed feeling that opens a new window into individual subjectivities and collective mentalities.
Download or read book Rereading Chaucer and Spenser written by Rachel Stenner and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-10 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete offers dynamic new approaches to the relationship between the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. Contributors draw on current and emerging preoccupations in contemporary scholarship and offer new perspectives on poetic authority, influence, and intertextuality.
Download or read book The Revenger s Tragedy A Critical Reader written by Brian Walsh and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Revenger's Tragedy is one of the most vital, important, and enduring tragedies of the Jacobean era, one of the few non-Shakespearean plays of that period that is still regularly revived on stage and taught in classrooms. The play is notable for its piercing insight into human depravity, its savage humour, and its florid theatricality. This collection of new essays offers students an invaluable overview of the play's critical and performance history as well as four critical essays offering a range of new perspectives.
Download or read book Shakespeare in the Marketplace of Words written by Jonathan P. Lamb and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the words, forms, and styles Shakespeare used to interact with the verbal marketplace of early modern England.
Download or read book Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare s England written by Tiffany Stern and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Rethinking Theatrical Documents brings together fifteen major scholars to analyse and theorise the documents, lost and found, that produced a play in Shakespeare's England. Showing how the playhouse frantically generated paratexts, it explores a rich variety of entangled documents, some known and some unknown: from before the play (drafts, casting lists, actors' parts); during the play (prologues, epilogues, title-boards); and after the play (playbooks, commonplace snippets, ballads) – though 'before', 'during' and 'after' intertwine in fascinating ways. By using collective intervention to rethink both theatre history and book history, it provides new ways of understanding plays critically, interpretatively, editorially, practically and textually.
Download or read book Shakespeare Music and Performance written by Bill Barclay and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-13 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music has been an essential constituent of Shakespeare's plays from the sixteenth century to the present day, yet its significance has often been overlooked or underplayed in the history of Shakespearean performance. Providing a long chronological sweep, this collection of essays traces the different uses of music in the theatre and in film from the days of the first Globe and Blackfriars to contemporary, global productions. With a unique concentration on the performance aspects of the subject, the volume offers a wide range of voices, from scholars to contemporary practitioners (including an interview with the critically acclaimed composer Stephen Warbeck), and thus provides a rich exploration of this fascinating history from diverse perspectives.
Download or read book Chaucer s Early Modern Readers written by Devani Singh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first extended study of the reception of Chaucer's medieval manuscripts in the early modern period, this book focuses chiefly on fifteenth-century manuscripts and discusses how these volumes were read, used, valued, and transformed in an age of the poet's prominence in print. Each chapter argues that patterns in the material interventions made by readers in their manuscripts – correcting, completing, supplementing, and authorising – reflect conventions which circulated in print, and convey prevailing preoccupations about Chaucer in the period: the antiquity and accuracy of his words, the completeness of individual texts and of the canon, and the figure of the author himself. This unexpected and compelling evidence of the interactions between fifteenth-century manuscripts and their early modern analogues asserts print's role in sustaining manuscript culture and thus offers fresh scholarly perspectives to medievalists, early modernists, and historians of the book. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Download or read book George Chapman Homer s Iliad written by Robert S. Miola and published by MHRA. This book was released on 2017-09-11 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Famously praised by John Keats for speaking ‘loud and bold’, Chapman’s Homer brought Greek poetry and civilization to life for centuries of readers. Many have praised its rough energy and creativity, the crashing power of the verses, its grim depiction of life and death in war. The companion to Gordon Kendal’s edition of Chapman’s Odyssey, this edition of his Iliad features a newly edited version of the 1611 printing (including all the translator’s combative notes and commentary) in modern spelling and punctuation. The introduction, “Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” explores the complicated history of revision behind the text, the intermediate Latin sources, and, most important, Chapman’s early modern reception of the Iliad, that is, the later political, cultural, social, literary, moral, and theological ideas that shape his reading of the ancient Greek text. The edition provides also full textual collations, lexical and explanatory notes, a glossary, bibliography, an appendix on Chapman’s contributions to the English language, and index. Like his great contemporary and rival, William Shakespeare, Chapman was a dramatist and one of the great wordsmiths of the Renaissance, a creator of the language that we speak and write today as Modern English. Chapman’s Iliad deploys the resources of this developing English language for stunning poetic effects; this raw and powerful version of Homer’s inspired song stands also as a masterpiece of English literature.
Download or read book Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England written by Jamie H. Ferguson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-03-28 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The expressive and literary capacities of post-Reformation English were largely shaped in response to the Bible. Faith in the Language examines the convergence of biblical interpretation and English literature, from William Tyndale to John Donne, and argues that the groundwork for a newly authoritative literary tradition in early modern England is laid in the discourse of biblical hermeneutics. The period 1525-1611 witnessed a proliferation of English biblical versions, provoking a century-long debate about how and whether the Bible should be rendered in English. These public, indeed institutional accounts of biblical English changed the language: questions about the relation between Scripture and exegetical tradition that shaped post-Reformation hermeneutics bore strange fruit in secular literature that defined itself through varying forms of autonomy vis-a-vis prior tradition.
Download or read book The Renaissance of the Saints After Reform written by Gina M. Di Salvo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-28 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The age of miracles was not yet past on the Shakespearean stage. In the first book-length study of the English saint play across the Reformation divide, The Renaissance of the Saints after Reform recovers the surprisingly long theatrical life of the saints from a tenth-century monastery to the Restoration stage. Through a reassessment of archival records of performance and religious change, this book challenges the established history of the saint play as a product of medieval devotional culture that ended with the national conversion to Protestantism during the Reformation. Not only did saints in performance frequently diverge from the narratives of devotional literature during the Middle Ages but also saints made a spectacular reappearance in the theatre of the early modern era. In the rupture between those two eras, the English church separated itself from the Cult of the Saints, and saints disappeared from public view until sainthood transformed from a matter of theology into a matter of theatricality. Early modern saint plays document a post-Reformation culture committed to saints-but not all saints. Certain ancient martyrs and British saints returned to the liturgical calendar in the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer. This limited inventory performed an initial de-Catholicization of these saints, but it did not recover their lives. Instead, the theatre produced new lives of the saints for the English public. A period of experimentation with saints and devils in the 1590s was followed by unprecedented innovation throughout the Stuart era. This book traces the transformation of sainthood in early modern drama from ambiguous supernatural association and negotiated patronage to a renaissance of miraculous theatricality and sacred place-making. By excavating saints in plays by Shakespeare, Heywood, Dekker, Massinger, and Rowley as well as plays authored by relatively unknown dramatists, this book reconfigures how we think about the legacy of late medieval religious culture, the impact of Reformation change on literary texts and social practices, and the development of English theatre and drama.
Download or read book Edmund Spenser in Context written by Andrew Escobedo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-24 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edmund Spenser's poetry remains an indispensable touchstone of English literary history. Yet for modern readers his deliberate use of archaic language and his allegorical mode of writing can become barriers to understanding his poetry. This volume of thirty-seven essays, written by distinguished scholars, offers a rich introduction to the literary, political and religious contexts that shaped Spenser's poetry, including the environment in which he lived, the genres he drew upon, and the influences that helped to fashion his art. The collection reveals the multiple personae that Spenser constructs within his work: to read Spenser is to read a rich archive of literary forms, and this volume provides the contexts in which to do so. A reading list at the end of the volume will prove invaluable to further study.
Download or read book Childhood Education and the Stage in early modern England written by Richard Preiss and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reveals the close connections between education and the stage in early modern England by looking at the child.
Download or read book Fossil Poetry written by Chris Jones and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-09 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fossil Poetry provides the first book-length overview of the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century poetry in English. It addresses the use and role of Anglo-Saxon as a resource by Romantic and Victorian poets in their own compositions, as well as the construction and 'invention' of Anglo-Saxon in and by nineteenth-century poetry. Fossil Poetry takes its title from a famous passage on 'early' language in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and uses the metaphor of the fossil to contextualize poetic Anglo-Saxonism within the developments that had been taking place in the fields of geology, palaeontology, and the evolutionary life sciences since James Hutton's apprehension of 'deep time' in his 1788 Theory of the Earth. Fossil Poetry argues that two, roughly consecutive phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism took place over the course of the nineteenth century: firstly, a phase of 'constant roots' whereby Anglo-Saxon is constructed to resemble, and so to legitimize a tradition of English Romanticism conceived as essential and unchanging; secondly, a phase in which the strangeness of many of the 'extinct' philological forms of early English is acknowledged, and becomes concurrent with a desire to recover and recuperate the fossils of Anglo-Saxon within contemporary English poetry. The volume advances new readings of work by a variety of poets including Walter Scott, Henry Longfellow, William Wordsworth, William Barnes, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Morris, Alfred Tennyson, and Gerard Hopkins.
