Download or read book The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature written by Peter Remien and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Participates in an intellectual history of ecology while prompting a re-evaluation of nature in the early modern period.
Download or read book Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature written by Todd A. Borlik and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-05-11 with total page 621 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this timely new study, Borlik reveals the surprisingly rich potential for the emergent "green" criticism to yield fresh insights into early modern English literature. Deftly avoiding the anachronistic casting of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors as modern environmentalists, he argues that environmental issues, such as nature’s personhood, deforestation, energy use, air quality, climate change, and animal sentience, are formative concerns in many early modern texts. The readings infuse a new urgency in familiar works by Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Ralegh, Jonson, Donne, and Milton. At the same time, the book forecasts how ecocriticism will bolster the reputation of less canonical authors like Drayton, Wroth, Bruno, Gascoigne, and Cavendish. Its chapters trace provocative affinities between topics such as Pythagorean ecology and the Gaia hypothesis, Ovidian tropes and green phenomenology, the disenchantment of Nature and the Little Ice Age, and early modern pastoral poetry and modern environmental ethics. It also examines the ecological onus of Renaissance poetics, while showcasing how the Elizabethans’ sense of a sophisticated interplay between nature and art can provide a precedent for ecocriticism’s current understanding of the relationship between nature and culture as "mutually constructive." Situating plays and poems alongside an eclectic array of secondary sources, including herbals, forestry laws, husbandry manuals, almanacs, and philosophical treatises on politics and ethics, Borlik demonstrates that Elizabethan and Jacobean authors were very much aware of, and concerned about, the impact of human beings on their natural surroundings.
Download or read book Early Modern English Literature written by Jason Scott-Warren and published by Polity. This book was released on 2005-10-07 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we engage with the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, we encounter a culture radically unfamiliar to us at the start of the twenty-first century. The past is a foreign country, and so too are many of its texts. This readable and provocative book seeks to enhance our understanding of early modern literature by recovering the contexts in which it was originally produced and consumed. Taking us back to the courts, theatres and marketplaces of early modern England, Jason Scott-Warren reveals the varied ways in which literary texts dovetailed with everyday experience, unlocking the distinctive social practices, economic structures and modes of behaviour that gave them meaning. He shows how the periods most beguiling writings were conditioned by long-forgotten notions of knowledge, nationhood, sexuality and personal identity. Bringing an anthropologists eye to his materials, he offers richly detailed new readings of works from within and beyond the canon, covering a span that stretches from Erasmus and More to Milton and Behn. Resisting any notion of the period as merely transitional a staging post on the road leading from the medieval to the modern world Scott-Warren reveals the distinctiveness of its literary culture, and equips the reader for fresh encounters with its extraordinary textual legacy. Any undergraduate student of the period will find it an essential guide, while scholars will find its fresh approach invigorating.
Download or read book Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature written by Katherine Acheson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern printed books are copiously illustrated with charts, diagrams, and other kinds of images that represent systems of thought and ways of doing things. Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature shows how these images fostered what Elizabeth Eisenstein called brainwork related to concepts of space, truth, art, and nature, and reveals their importance to poetry by Andrew Marvell and John Milton, and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. The genres of illustration considered in this book include military strategy and tactics, garden design, instrumentation, Bibles, scientific schema, drawing instruction, natural history, comparative anatomy, and Aesop’s Fables. The argument produces unique insights into the ways in which visual rhetoric affected verbal expression, and the book develops novel methods of using printed images as evidence in the interpretation of the rich, strange, and beautiful literature of early modern England.
Download or read book Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance written by Todd Andrew Borlik and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-20 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring over two hundred nature-themed texts spanning the disciplines of literature, science and history, this sourcebook offers an accessible field guide to the environment of Renaissance England, revealing a nation at a crossroads between its pastoral heritage and industrialized future. Carefully selected primary sources, each modernized and prefaced with an introduction, survey an encyclopaedic array of topographies, species, and topics: from astrology to zoology, bear-baiting to bee-keeping, coal-mining to tree-planting, fen-draining to sheep-whispering. The familiar voices of Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marvell mingle with a diverse chorus of farmers, herbalists, shepherds, hunters, foresters, philosophers, sailors, sky-watchers, and duchesses - as well as ventriloquized beasts, trees, and rivers. Lavishly illustrated, the anthology is supported by a lucid introduction that outlines and intervenes in key debates in Renaissance ecocriticism, a reflective essay on ecocritical editing, a bibliography of further reading, and a timeline of environmental history and legislation drawing on extensive archival research.
Download or read book Women s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture written by Michelle M. Dowd and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-04-13 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dowd investigates literature's engagement with the gendered conflicts of early modern England by examining the narratives that seventeenth-century dramatists created to describe the lives of working women.
Download or read book Speaking for Nature written by Sylvia Bowerbank and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2004-06-28 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book contains perceptions of nature and ecology in writings by English women authors from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Includes discussion of works by the writers: Mary Wroth (ca. 1586-ca. 1640), Margaret Cavendish (1624?-1674), Mary Rich Warwick (1625-1678), Catherine Talbot (1721-1770), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797).
Download or read book Irregular Unions written by Katharine Cleland and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Katharine Cleland's Irregular Unions provides the first sustained literary history of clandestine marriage in early modern England and reveals its controversial nature in the wake of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, which standardized the marriage ritual for the first time. Cleland examines many examples of clandestine marriage across genres. Discussing such classic works as The Faerie Queene, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, she argues that early modern authors used clandestine marriage to explore the intersection between the self and the marriage ritual in post-Reformation England. The ways in which authors grappled with the political and social complexities of clandestine marriage, Cleland finds, suggest that these narratives were far more than interesting plot devices or scandalous stories ripped from the headlines. Instead, after the Reformation, fictions of clandestine marriage allowed early modern authors to explore topics of identity formation in new and different ways. Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
Download or read book Early Modern cologies written by Pauline Goul and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-06 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Modern Écologies is the first collective volume to offer perspectives on the relationship between contemporary ecological thought and early modern French literature. If Descartes spoke of humans as being "masters and possessors of Nature" in the seventeenth century, the writers taken up in this volume arguably demonstrated a more complex and urgent understanding of the human relationship to our shared planet. Opening up a rich archive of literary and non-literary texts produced by Montaigne and his contemporaries, this volume foregrounds not how ecocriticism renews our understanding of a literary corpus, but rather how that corpus causes us to re-think or to nuance contemporary eco-theory. The sparsely bilingual title (an acute accent on écologies) denotes the primary task at hand: to pluralize (i.e. de-Anglophone-ize) the Environmental Humanities. Featuring established and emerging scholars from Europe and the United States, Early Modern Écologies opens up new dialogues between eco-theorists such as Timothy Morton, Gilles Deleuze, and Bruno Latour and Montaigne, Ronsard, Du Bartas, and Olivier de Serres.
Download or read book Writing the Forest in Early Modern England written by Jeffrey S. Theis and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An ecocritical study of forests in early modern English literature, this book is the first to identify 'sylvan pastoral' as a distinct literary form and thus makes an important contribution to the growing field of ecocriticism and the history of environmentalism"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature and Culture written by Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen and published by D. S. Brewer. This book was released on 2012 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the themes of pain and compassion in key Renaissance writers, at a time when religious attitudes to suffering were changing.
Download or read book Sinister Aesthetics written by Joel Elliot Slotkin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-06-22 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engrossing volume studies the poetics of evil in early modern English culture, reconciling the Renaissance belief that literature should uphold morality with the compelling and attractive representations of evil throughout the period’s literature. The chapters explore a variety of texts, including Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Richard III, broadside ballads, and sermons, culminating in a new reading of Paradise Lost and a novel understanding of the dynamic interaction between aesthetics and theology in shaping seventeenth century Protestant piety. Through these discussions, the book introduces the concept of “sinister aesthetics”: artistic conventions that can make representations of the villainous, monstrous, or hellish pleasurable.
Download or read book Islam and Early Modern English Literature written by Benedict S. Robinson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the process through which authors like Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton adapted, rewrote, or resisted romance, mapping a world in which new cross-cultural contacts and religious conflicts demanded a rethinking of some of the most fundamental terms of early modern identity.
Download or read book Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature written by Joshua Scodel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how English writers from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration transformed and contested the ancient ideal of the virtuous mean. As early modern authors learned at grammar school and university, Aristotle and other classical thinkers praised "golden means" balanced between extremes: courage, for example, as opposed to cowardice or recklessness. By uncovering the enormous variety of English responses to this ethical doctrine, Joshua Scodel revises our understanding of the vital interaction between classical thought and early modern literary culture. Scodel argues that English authors used the ancient schema of means and extremes in innovative and contentious ways hitherto ignored by scholars. Through close readings of diverse writers and genres, he shows that conflicting representations of means and extremes figured prominently in the emergence of a self-consciously modern English culture. Donne, for example, reshaped the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while Bacon held extremism necessary for human empowerment. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgics from Spenser to Cowley exhorted England to embody the mean or lauded extreme paths to national greatness. Drinking poetry from Jonson to Rochester expressed opposing visions of convivial moderation and drunken excess, while erotic writing from Sidney to Dryden and Behn pitted extreme passion against the traditional mean of conjugal moderation. Challenging his predecessors in various genres, Milton celebrated golden means of restrained pleasure and self-respect. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Scodel suggests how early modern treatments of means and extremes resonate in present-day cultural debates.
Download or read book The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology written by Paul Cefalu and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume highlights how the Fourth Gospel and First Epistle of Saint John the Evangelist were leading apostolic texts during the early modern period in England, and the importance of Johannine theology to early modern religious poetry.
Download or read book Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture written by Will Fisher and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-07-06 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyses the construction of gender through bodily elements and clothing in early modern England.
Download or read book Fictions of Embassy written by Timothy Hampton and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians of early modern Europe have long stressed how new practices of diplomacy that emerged during the period transformed European politics. Fictions of Embassy is the first book to examine the cultural implications of the rise of modern diplomacy. Ranging across two and a half centuries and half a dozen languages, Timothy Hampton opens a new perspective on the intersection of literature and politics at the dawn of modernity. Hampton argues that literary texts-tragedies, epics, essays-use scenes of diplomatic negotiation to explore the relationship between politics and aesthetics, between the world of political rhetoric and the dynamics of literary form. The diplomatic encounter is a scene of cultural exchange and linguistic negotiation. Literary depictions of diplomacy offer occasions for reflection on the definition of genre, on the power of representation, on the limits of rhetoric, on the nature of fiction making itself. Conversely, discussions of diplomacy by jurists, political philosophers, and ambassadors deploy the tools of literary tradition to articulate new theories of political action.Hampton addresses these topics through a discussion of the major diplomatic writers between 1450 and 1700-Machiavelli, Grotius, Gentili, Guicciardini-and through detailed readings of literary works that address the same topics-works by Shakespeare, More, Rabelais, Montaigne, Tasso, Corneille, Racine, and Camoens. He demonstrates that the issues raised by diplomatic theorists helped shape the emergence of new literary forms, and that literature provides a lens through which we can learn to read the languages of diplomacy.
