Download or read book Plotting Motherhood in Medieval Early Modern and Modern Literature written by Mary Beth Rose and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the inconsistent literary representations of motherhood in diverse texts ranging from the fourth to the twentieth centuries. Mary Beth Rose unearths plots startling in their frequency and redundancy that struggle to accommodate —or to obliterate—the complex assertions of maternal authority as it challenges traditional family and social structures. The analysis engages two mother plots: the dead mother plot, in which the mother is dying or dead; and the living mother plot, in which the mother is alive and through her very presence in the text, puts often unbearable pressure on the mechanics of the plot. These plots reappear and are transformed by authors as diverse in chronology and use of literary form as Augustine, Shakespeare, Milton, Oscar Wilde, and Tony Kushner. The book argues that, insofar as women become the second sex, it is not because they are females per se but because they are mothers; at the same time the analysis probes the transformative political and social potential of motherhood as it appears in contemporary texts like Angels in America.

Download or read book Boundaries of Violence in Early Modern England written by Samantha Dressel and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-25 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the possibilities and limitations of violence on the Early Modern stage and in the Early Modern world. This collection is divided into three sections: History-cal Violence, (Un)Comic Violence, and Revenge Violence. This division allows scholars to easily find intertextual materials; comic violence may function similarly across multiple comedies but is vastly different from most tragic violence. While the source texts move beyond Shakespeare, this book follows the classic division of Shakespeare’s plays into history, comedy, and tragedy. Each section of the book contains one chapter engaging with modern dramatic practice along with several that take textual or historical approaches. This wide-ranging approach means that the book will be appropriate both for specialists in Early Modern violence who are looking across multiple perspectives, and for students or scholars researching texts or approaches.

Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare s Queens written by Kavita Mudan Finn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-20 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays, fifteen include queens. This collection gives these characters their due as powerful early modern women and agents of change, bringing together new perspectives from scholars of literature, history, theater, and the fine arts. Essays span Shakespeare’s career and cover a range of famous and lesser-known queens, from the furious Margaret of Anjou in the Henry VI plays to the quietly powerful Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; from vengeful Tamora in Titus Andronicus to Lady Macbeth. Early chapters situate readers in the critical concerns underpinning any discussion of Shakespeare and queenship: the ambiguous figure of Elizabeth I, and the knotty issue of gender presentation. The focus then moves to analysis of issues such as motherhood, intertextuality, and contemporary political contexts; close readings of individual plays; and investigations of rhetoric and theatricality. Featuring twenty-five chapters with a rich variety of themes and methodologies, this handbook is an invaluable reference for students and scholars, and a unique addition to the fields of Shakespeare and queenship studies.

Download or read book Pregnant Bodies from Shakespeare to Ford written by Katarzyna Burzyńska and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how the pregnant body is portrayed, perceived and enacted in Shakespeare’s and his contemporaries’ drama by means of a phenomenological analysis and a recourse to early modern popular medical discourse on reproduction. Phenomenology of pregnancy is a fairly new and radical body of philosophy that questions the post-Cartesian chasm of an almost autonomous reason and an enclosed and self-sufficient (male) body as foundations of identity. Early modern drama, as is argued, was written and staged at the backdrop of revolutionary changes in medicine and science where old and new theories on the embodied self-clashed. In this world where more and more men were expected to steadily grow isolated from their bodies, the pregnant body constituted an embattled contradiction. Indebted to the theories of embodiment this book offers a meticulous and detailed investigation of a plethora of pregnant characters and their “pregnant embodiment” in the pre-modern works by Shakespeare, Middleton, Webster and Ford. The analysis in each chapter argues for an indivisible link between an intensely embodied experience of pregnancy as enacted in space and identity-shaping processes resulting in a more acute sense of selfhood and agency. Despite seemingly disparate experiences of the selected heroines and the repeated attempts at containment of their “unruly” bodies, the ever transforming and “spatial” pregnant identities remain loci of embodied selfhood and agency. This book provocatively argues that fictional characters’ experience reflects tangible realities of early modern women, while often deflecting the scientific consensus on reproduction in the period.

Download or read book Virtuous or Villainess The Image of the Royal Mother from the Early Medieval to the Early Modern Era written by Carey Fleiner and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection addresses royal motherhood across Europe, from both the medieval and Early Modern periods, including (in)famous and not-so-famous royal mothers. The essays in this collection reveal the complexities and the subtleties inherent in the role of royal mothers and challenges these traditional stereotypes. The volume provides a fresh re-evaluation of these women, from those who have been given an almost saintly status to those who struggled against contemporary chronicles and propaganda that perpetuated the stereotypes associated with ‘bad mothers’– these particular images of saintliness and wickedness have persisted right into the modern era. This series of intriguing case studies reveals how royal mothers were perceived by their contemporaries and explores the motivation for the ways in which they are depicted in modern popular culture. Taken together with the companion volume, Royal Mothers and their Ruling Children, this collection sheds new light on the important and challenging role of mothers within the framework of monarchy and at the epicenter of power.

Download or read book Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England written by Karen Bamford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though recent scholarship has focused both on motherhood and on romance literature in early modern England, until now, no full length volume has addressed the notable intersections between the two topics. This collection contributes to the scholarly investigation of maternity in early modern England by scrutinizing romance narratives in various forms, considering motherhood not as it was actually lived, but as it was figured in the fantasy world of romance by authors ranging from Edmund Spenser to Margaret Cavendish. Contributors explore the traditional association between romance and women, both as readers of fiction and as tellers of ’old wives’ tales,’ as well as the tendency of romance plots, with their emphasis on the family and its reproduction, to foreground matters of maternity. Collectively, the essays in this volume invite reflection on the uses to which Renaissance culture put maternal stereotypes (the virgin mother, the cruel step-dame), as well as the powerful fears and desires that mothers evoke, assuage and sometimes express in the fantasy world of romance.

Download or read book Breastfeeding and Mothering in Antiquity and Early Byzantium written by Stavroula Constantinou and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers the first comparative, interdisciplinary, and intercultural examination of the lactating woman – biological mother and othermother – in antiquity and early Byzantium. Adopting methodologies and knowledge deriving from a variety of disciplines, the volume’s contributors investigate the close interrelationship between a woman and her lactating breasts, as well as the social, ideological, theological, and medical meanings and uses of motherhood, childbirth, and breastfeeding, along with their visual and literary representations. Breastfeeding and the work of mothering are explored through the study of a great variety of sources, mainly works of Greek-speaking cultures, written and visual, anonymous and eponymous, which were mostly produced between the first and the seventh century AD. Due to their multiple interdisciplinary dimensions, ancient and early Byzantine lactating women are approached through three interconnected thematic strands having a twofold focus: society and ideology, medicine and practice, and art and literature. By developing the model of the lactating woman, the volume offers a new analytical framework for understanding a significant part of the still unwritten cultural history of the period. At the same time, the volume significantly contributes to the emerging fields of breast and motherhood studies. The new and significant knowledge generated in the fields of ancient and Byzantine studies may also prove useful for cultural historians in general and other disciplines, such as literary studies, art history, history of medicine, philosophy, theology, sociology, anthropology, and gender studies.

Download or read book Women s Wealth and Women s Writing in Early Modern England written by Elizabeth Mazzola and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on both literary and material networks in early modern England, this book examines the nature of women's wealth, its peculiar laws of transmission and accumulation, and how a world of goods and favors, mothers and daughters was transformed by market culture. Drawing on the long and troubled relationship between Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart, Bess of Hardwick, and Arbella Stuart, Elizabeth Mazzola more broadly explores what early modern women might exchange with or leave to each other, including jewels and cloth, needlework, combs, and candlesticks. Women's writings take their place in this circulation of material things, and Mazzola argues that their poems and prayers, letters and wills are particularly designed with the aim of substantiating female ties. This book is an interdisciplinary one, making use of archival research, literary criticism, social history, feminist theory, and anthropological studies of gift exchange to propose that early modern women - whatever their class, educational background or marital status - were key economic players, actively pursuing favors, trading services, and exchanging goods.

Download or read book The Reproductive Unconscious in Late Medieval and Early Modern England written by Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing together social and medical history and literary studies, The Reproductive Unconscious in Late Medieval and Early Modern England studies the social practices and metaphorical representations of childbirth in medieval and early modern texts and argues for the existence of a reproductive unconscious. Discussing midwifery treatises, obstetrical and gynecological manuals, and devotional texts written for or by women, the author illustrates the ways in which medieval and early modern men and women negotiated a conflict between the ideological and material need of the culture for them to procreate, and an ideological injunction that they remain virginal and non-procreative.

Download or read book Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature written by C. Rose and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In thirteen studies of representations of rape in Medieval and Early Modern literature by such authors as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Spenser, this volume argues that some form of sexual violence against women serves as a foundation of Western culture. The volume has two purposes: first, to explore the resistance these pervasive representations generate and have generated for readers - especially for the female reader- and second, to explore what these representations tell us about social formations governing the relationships between men and women. More particularly, Rose and Robertson are interested in how representations of rape manifest a given culture's understanding of the female subject in society.

Download or read book Medieval and Early Modern Literature Science and Medicine written by Rachel Falconer Denis Renevey and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2014-12-22 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This inter-disciplinary volume explores the poetics of medicine and science, and the scientific aspects of literary and devotional works in a wide-ranging selection of texts from the medieval and early modern periods. Areas of knowedge which we now regard as occupying separate and specialist spheres, were freely and fluidly hybridized in medieval and early modern times

Download or read book Form and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Literature written by Daniel G Donoghue and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New and exciting scholarship on medieval and early modern English culture in all its diversity. This book honours James Simpson, an enormously influential figure in English literary studies. Known for championing once-neglected writers such as Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate, Simpson has also pioneered the field of Trans-Reformation studies, dismantling the barrier between the medieval and early modern periods. He has written powerfully about the history of freedoms, the relationship between literary and intellectual history, and about the category of the literary itself in all its urgency. Inspired by Simpson's interventions, the essays collected here deal with texts and topics from the eighth to the seventeenth centuries. Langland's Piers Plowman and Chaucer's Physician's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde rub shoulders with Old English riddles, Saint Erkenwald, The Digby Lyrics, Lydgate's Dietary, and Lodge's Robert the Devil. Revisionist studies of two much-debated genres - allegory and romance - join forces with chapters on neglected physical features of early books, line-fillers and catchwords, as well as studies of iconoclasm and the histories of enemy love. The volume begins with a piece by the honorand himself, on recognition in literary texts.th chapters on neglected physical features of early books, line-fillers and catchwords, as well as studies of iconoclasm and the histories of enemy love. The volume begins with a piece by the honorand himself, on recognition in literary texts.th chapters on neglected physical features of early books, line-fillers and catchwords, as well as studies of iconoclasm and the histories of enemy love. The volume begins with a piece by the honorand himself, on recognition in literary texts.th chapters on neglected physical features of early books, line-fillers and catchwords, as well as studies of iconoclasm and the histories of enemy love. The volume begins with a piece by the honorand himself, on recognition in literary texts.

Download or read book Chaste Value written by Katherine Gillen and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-09 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chaste Value reassesses chastity's significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage's production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. Plays invoke chastity-itself a quasi-commodity-to interrogate the relationship between personal and economic value. Through chastity discourse, the stage disrupts pre-capitalist ideas of intrinsic value while also reallocating such value according to emerging hierarchies of gender, race, class, and nationality. Chastity, therefore, emerges as a central category within early articulations of humanity, determining who possesses intrinsic value and, conversely, whose bodies and labor can be incorporated into market exchange.

Download or read book Early Modern Japanese Literature written by Haruo Shirane and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-21 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This abridged edition of Haruo Shirane's popular anthology, Early Modern Japanese Literature, retains the essential texts that have made the original volume such a valuable resource. The book introduces English-speaking readers to prose fiction genres, including dangibon, kibyoshi (satiric picture books), sharebon (books of wit and fashion), yomihon, kokkeibon (books of humor), gokan (bound books), and ninjobon (books of romance and sentiment). It also features poetic genres such as waka, haiku, senryu, and kyoka, and plays ranging from Chikamatsu's puppet plays to nineteenth-century kabuki. Readers will continue to benefit from the anthology's selection of significant essays, treatises, literary criticism, folk stories, and other noncanonical works, as well as the numerous prints that accompanied these works. They will also find Shirane's introductions and critical commentary, which guide the reader through the allusive and often elliptical nature of these incredible selections.

Download or read book Conversions written by Simon Ditchfield and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conversions is the first collection to explicitly address the intersections between sexed identity and religious change in the two centuries following the Reformation. Chapters deal with topics as diverse as convent architecture and missionary enterprise, the replicability of print and the representation of race. Bringing together leading scholars of literature, history and art history, Conversions offers new insights into the varied experiences of, and responses to, conversion across and beyond Europe. A lively Afterword by Professor Matthew Dimmock (University of Sussex) drives home the contemporary urgency of these themes and the lasting legacies of the Reformations.

Download or read book Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the city as a central entity did not simply disappear with the Fall of the Roman Empire, the development of urban space at least since the twelfth century played a major role in the history of medieval and early modern mentality within a social-economic and religious framework. Whereas some poets projected urban space as a new utopia, others simply reflected the new significance of the urban environment as a stage where their characters operate very successfully. As today, the premodern city was the locus where different social groups and classes got together, sometimes peacefully, sometimes in hostile terms. The historical development of the relationship between Christians and Jews, for instance, was deeply determined by the living conditions within a city. By the late Middle Ages, nobility and bourgeoisie began to intermingle within the urban space, which set the stage for dramatic and far-reaching changes in the social and economic make-up of society. Legal-historical aspects also find as much consideration as practical questions concerning water supply and sewer systems. Moreover, the early modern city within the Ottoman and Middle Eastern world likewise finds consideration. Finally, as some contributors observe, the urban space provided considerable opportunities for women to carve out a niche for themselves in economic terms.

Download or read book Reading Humility in Early Modern England written by Jennifer Clement and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While humility is not especially valued in modern Western culture, Jennifer Clement argues here, it is central to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century understandings of Christian faith and behavior, and is vital to early modern concepts of the self. As this study shows, early modern literary engagements with humility link it to self-knowledge through the practice of right reading, and make humility foundational to any proper understanding of human agency. Yet humility has received little critical interest, and has often been misunderstood as a false virtue that engenders only self-abjection. This study offers an overview of various ways in which humility is discussed, deployed, or resisted in early modern texts ranging from the explicitly religious and autobiographical prose of Katherine Parr and John Donne, to the more politically motivated prose of Queen Elizabeth I and the seventeenth-century reformer and radical Thomas Tryon. As part of the wider 'turn to religion' in early modern studies, this study seeks to complicate our understanding of a mainstream early modern virtue, and to problematize a mode of critical analysis that assumes agency is always defined by resistance.