Download or read book The Performance of Nobility in Early Modern European Literature written by David M. Posner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-11-04 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This valuable study illuminates the idea of nobility as display, as public performance, in Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature and society. Ranging widely from Castiglione and French courtesy manuals, through Montaigne and Bacon, to the literature of the Grand Siècle, David Posner examines the structures of public identity in the period. He focuses on the developing tensions between, on the one hand, literary or imaginative representations of 'nobility' and, on the other, the increasingly problematic historical position of the nobility themselves. These tensions produce a transformation in the notion of the noble self as a performance, and eventually doom court society and its theatrical mode of self-presentation. Situated at the intersection of rhetorical and historical theories of interpretation, this book contributes significantly to our understanding of the role of literature both in analysing and in shaping social identity.
Download or read book The Performance of Nobility in Early Modern European Literature written by David Matthew Posner and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This valuable study illuminates the idea of nobility as display, as public performance, in Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature and society. Through detailed readings of major authors, David Posner examines the tensions between literary or imaginative representations of 'nobility', and the increasingly problematic historical position of the noble classes themselves.
Download or read book Contested Spaces of Nobility in Early Modern Europe written by Charles Lipp and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years scholars have increasingly challenged and reassessed the once established concept of the 'crisis of the nobility' in early-modern Europe. Offering a range of case studies from countries across Europe this collection further expands our understanding of just how the nobility adapted to the rapidly changing social, political, religious and cultural circumstances around them. By allowing readers to compare and contrast a variety of case studies across a range of national and disciplinary boundaries, a fuller - if more complex - picture emerges of the strategies and actions employed by nobles to retain their influence and wealth. The nobility exploited Renaissance science and education, disruptions caused by war and religious strife, changing political ideas and concepts, the growth of a market economy, and the evolution of centralized states in order to maintain their lineage, reputation, and position. Through an examination of the differing strategies utilized to protect their status, this collection reveals much about the fundamental role of the 'second order' in European history and how they had to redefine the social and cultural 'spaces' in which they found themselves. By using a transnational and comparative approach to the study of the European nobility, the volume offers exciting new perspectives on this important, if often misunderstood, social group.
Download or read book The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe written by Warren Boutcher and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first volume of a major two-volume study centers on the fortunes of Michel de Montaigne's Essais in both the early-modern (1580-1725) and the modern period (1900-2000). This volume examines how the Essais made Montaigne a patron-author or instant classic in the eyes of his peers.
Download or read book Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature written by Jennifer Richards and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-05-22 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature explores the early modern interest in conversation as a newly identified art. Conversation was widely accepted to have been inspired by the republican philosopher Cicero. Recognizing his influence on courtesy literature - the main source for 'civil conversation' - Jennifer Richards uncovers alternative ways of thinking about humanism as a project of linguistic and social reform. She argues that humanists explored styles of conversation to reform the manner of association between male associates; teachers and students, buyers and sellers, and settlers and colonial others. They reconsidered the meaning of 'honesty' in social interchange in an attempt to represent the tension between self-interest and social duty. Richards explores the interest in civil conversation among mid-Tudor humanists, John Cheke, Thomas Smith and Roger Ascham, as well as their self-styled successors, Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser.
Download or read book Contested Spaces of Nobility in Early Modern Europe written by Professor Charles Lipp and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-07-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years scholars have increasingly challenged and reassessed the once established concept of the 'crisis of the nobility' in early-modern Europe. Offering a range of case studies from countries across Europe this collection further expands our understanding of just how the nobility adapted to the rapidly changing social, political, religious and cultural circumstances around them. By allowing readers to compare and contrast a variety of case studies across a range of national and disciplinary boundaries, a fuller - if more complex - picture emerges of the strategies and actions employed by nobles to retain their influence and wealth. The nobility exploited Renaissance science and education, disruptions caused by war and religious strife, changing political ideas and concepts, the growth of a market economy, and the evolution of centralized states in order to maintain their lineage, reputation, and position. Through an examination of the differing strategies utilized to protect their status, this collection reveals much about the fundamental role of the 'second order' in European history and how they had to redefine the social and cultural 'spaces' in which they found themselves. By using a transnational and comparative approach to the study of the European nobility, the volume offers exciting new perspectives on this important, if often misunderstood, social group.
Download or read book Country House Discourse in Early Modern England written by Kari Boyd McBride and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: McBride provides new perspectives on the roles of the country house discourse she identifies, linking it with a number of larger historical shifts during the time period. Her interdisciplinary focus allows her to bring together a wide range of material - including architecture, poetry, oil painting, economic and social history, and proscriptive literature - in order to examine their complex interrelationship, revealing connections unexplored in more narrowly focused studies.
Download or read book Defending Literature in Early Modern England written by Robert Matz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-07-27 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why was literature so often defended and defined in early modern England in terms of its ability to provide the Horatian ideal of both profit and pleasure? This book, first published in 2000, analyses Renaissance literary theory in the context of social transformations of the period, focusing on conflicting ideas about gentility that emerged as the English aristocracy evolved from a feudal warrior class to a civil elite. Through close readings centered on works by Thomas Elyot, Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Matz argues that literature attempted to mediate a complex set of contradictory social expectations. His original study engages with important theoretical work such as Pierre Bourdieu's and offers a substantial critique of New Historicist theory. It challenges recent accounts of the power of Renaissance authorship, emphasizing the uncertain status of literature during this time of cultural change, and sheds light on why and how canonical works became canonical.
Download or read book The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature written by Tina Skouen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stigma of haste pervaded early modern English culture, more so than the so-called stigma of print. The period’s writers were perpetually short on time, but what does it mean for authors to present themselves as hasty or slow, or to characterize others similarly? This book argues that such classifications were a way to define literary value. To be hasty was, in a sense, to be irresponsible, but, in another sense, it signaled a necessary practicality. Expressions of haste revealed a deep conflict between the ideal of slow writing in classical and humanist rhetoric and the sometimes grim reality of fast printing. Indeed, the history of print is a history of haste, which carries with it a particular set of modern anxieties that are difficult to understand in the absence of an interdisciplinary approach. Many previous studies have concentrated on the period’s competing definitions of time and on the obsession with how to use time well. Other studies have considered time as a notable literary theme. This book is the first to connect ideas of time to writerly haste in a richly interdisciplinary manner, drawing upon rhetorical theory, book history, poetics, religious studies and early modern moral philosophy, which, only when taken together, provide a genuinely deep understanding of why the stigma of haste so preoccupied the early modern mind. The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature surveys the period from ca 1580 to ca 1730, with special emphasis on the seventeenth century. The material discussed is found in emblem books, devotional literature, philosophical works, and collections of poetry, drama and romance. Among classical sources, Horace and Quintilian are especially important. The main authors considered are: Robert Parsons; Edmund Bunny; King James 1; Henry Peacham; Thomas Nash; Robert Greene; Ben Jonson; Margaret Cavendish; John Dryden; Richard Baxter; Jonathan Swift; Alexander Pope. By studying these writers’ expressions of time and haste, we may gain a better understanding of how authorship was defined at a time when the book industry was gradually taking the place of classical rhetoric in regulating writers’ activities.
Download or read book The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England written by Valerie Traub and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-06-06 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England is the eagerly-awaited study by the feminist scholar who was among the first to address the issue of early modern female homoeroticism. Valerie Traub analyzes the representation of female-female love, desire and eroticism in a range of early modern discourses, including poetry, drama, visual arts, pornography and medicine. Contrary to the silence and invisibility typically ascribed to lesbianism in the Renaissance, Traub argues that the early modern period witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of representations of such desire. By means of sophisticated interpretations of a comprehensive set of texts, the book not only charts a crucial shift in representations of female homoeroticism over the course of the seventeenth century, but also offers a provocative genealogy of contemporary lesbianism. A contribution to the history of sexuality and to feminist and queer theory, the book addresses current theoretical preoccupations through the lens of historical inquiry.
Download or read book Science Reading and Renaissance Literature written by Elizabeth Spiller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-05-27 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature brings together key works in early modern science and imaginative literature (from the anatomy of William Harvey and the experimentalism of William Gilbert to the fictions of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Margaret Cavendish). The book documents how what have become our two cultures of belief define themselves through a shared aesthetics that understands knowledge as an act of making. Within this framework, literary texts gain substance and intelligibility by being considered as instances of early modern knowledge production. At the same time, early modern science maintains strong affiliations with poetry because it understands art as a basis for producing knowledge. In identifying these interconnections between literature and science, this book contributes to scholarship in literary history, history of reading and the book, science studies and the history of academic disciplines.
Download or read book Early Modern Civil Discourses written by J. Richards and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-09-09 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores the concept of civility in the early modern period. It addresses a range of writings in English and Scots - among them, conduct manuals, colonial tracts, diaries, letters, dialogues, poetry, drama, chronicles - by English, Welsh and Scots men and women in and about the Atlantic archipelago. It explores the many meanings of civility in the early modern period; it recovers some of the lost associations of civility as well as the complex use of the adjectives 'civil' and 'barbarous' in cultural and colonial encounters.
Download or read book Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England written by Michael C. Schoenfeldt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the close relationship between inner psychology and bodily processes as represented in English Renaissance poetry.
Download or read book The European Nobility 1400 1800 written by Jonathan Dewald and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-05-16 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authoritative and accessible survey of the European nobility over four centuries.
Download or read book Before Orientalism written by Richmond Tyler Barbour and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-10-16 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
Download or read book The Duel in Early Modern England written by Markku Peltonen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-30 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguments about the place and practice of the duel in early modern England were widespread. The distinguished intellectual historian Markku Peltonen examines this debate, and show how the moral and ideological status of duelling was discussed within a much larger cultural context of courtesy, civility and politeness. The advocates of the duel, following Italian and French examples, contended that it maintained and enhanced politeness; its critics by contrast increasingly severed duelling from civility, and this separation became part of a vigorous attempt in the late seventeenth century and beyond to redefine civility, politeness and indeed the nature and evolution of Englishness. To understand the duel is to understand much more fully some crucial issues in the cultural and ideological history of Stuart England, and Markku Peltonen's study will thus engage the attention of a very wide audience of historians and cultural and literary scholars.
Download or read book Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England written by Christopher Warley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-28 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why were sonnet sequences popular in Renaissance England? In this study, Christopher Warley suggests that sonneteers created a vocabulary to describe, and to invent, new forms of social distinction before an explicit language of social class existed. The tensions inherent in the genre - between lyric and narrative, between sonnet and sequence - offered writers a means of reconceptualizing the relation between individuals and society, a way to try to come to grips with the broad social transformations taking place at the end of the sixteenth century. By stressing the struggle over social classification, the book revises studies that have tied the influence of sonnet sequences to either courtly love or to Renaissance individualism. Drawing on Marxist aesthetic theory, it offers detailed examinations of sequences by Lok, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. It will be valuable to readers interested in Renaissance and genre studies, and post-Marxist theories of class.
