Download or read book The Imagination in Early Modern English Literature written by Deanna Smid and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Imagination in Early Modern English Literature, Deanna Smid presents a literary, historical account of imagination in early modern English literature, paying special attention to its effects on the body, to its influence on women, to its restraint by reason, and to its ability to create novelty. An early modern definition of imagination emerges in the work of Robert Burton, Francis Bacon, Edward Reynolds, and Margaret Cavendish. Smid explores a variety of literary texts, from Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler to Francis Quarles’s Emblems, to demonstrate the literary consequences of the early modern imagination. The Imagination in Early Modern English Literature insists that, if we are to call an early modern text “imaginative,” we must recognize the unique characteristics of early modern English imagination, in all its complexity.

Download or read book Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England written by Sophie Read and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of six canonical early modern lyric poets and the impact of the Eucharist on their work.

Download or read book The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature written by Rachel Stenner and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-07-04 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The typographic imaginary is an aesthetic linking authors from William Caxton to Alexander Pope, this study centrally contends. Early modern English literature engages imaginatively with printing and this book both characterizes that engagement and proposes the typographic imaginary as a framework for its analysis. Certain texts, Rachel Stenner states, describe the people, places, concerns, and processes of printing in ways that, over time, generate their own figurative authority. The typographic imaginary is posited as a literary phenomenon shared by different writers, a wider cultural understanding of printing, and a critical concept for unpicking the particular imaginative otherness that printing introduced to literature. Authors use the typographic imaginary to interrogate their place in an evolving media environment, to assess the value of the printed text, and to analyse the roles of other text-producing agents. This book treats a broad array of authors and forms: printers’ manuals; William Caxton’s paratexts; the pamphlet dialogues of Robert Copland and Ned Ward; poetic miscellanies; the prose fictions of William Baldwin, George Gascoigne, and Thomas Nashe; the poetry and prose of Edmund Spenser; writings by John Taylor and Alexander Pope. At its broadest, this study contributes to an understanding of how technology changes cultures. Located at the crossroads between literary, material, and book historical research, the particular intervention that this work makes is threefold. In describing the typographic imaginary, it proposes a new framework for analysis of print culture. It aims to focus critical engagement on symbolic representations of material forms. Finally, it describes a lineage of late medieval and early modern authors, stretching from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, that are linked by their engagement of a particular aesthetic.

Download or read book Early Modern English Poetry written by Patrick Cheney and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text features 28 essays written by important international scholars on the major poems of the English Renaissance. It offers scholarship on subjects ranging from the invention of English verse, Petrarchism, pastoral, elegy, and satire, to women's religious verse, the place of homoeroticism and Cavalier poetry.

Download or read book Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature written by Anita Gilman Sherman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-29 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious account of skepticism's effects on major authors of England's Golden Age shows how key philosophical problems inspired literary innovations in poetry and prose. When figures like Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert of Cherbury, Cavendish, Marvell and Milton question theories of language, degrees of knowledge and belief, and dwell on the uncertainties of perception, they forever change English literature, ushering it into a secular mode. While tracing a narrative arc from medieval nominalism to late seventeenth-century taste, the book explores the aesthetic pleasures and political quandaries induced by skeptical doubt. It also incorporates modern philosophical views of skepticism: those of Stanley Cavell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roland Barthes, and Hans Blumenberg, among others. The book thus contributes to interdisciplinary studies of philosophy and literature as well as to current debates about skepticism as a secularizing force, fostering civil liberties and religious freedoms.

Download or read book The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain written by Donald R. Kelley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-09-13 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distinguished historians and literary scholars explore the overlap, interplay, and interaction between history and fiction.

Download or read book Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-08-24 with total page 820 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.

Download or read book Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination written by Vin Nardizzi and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination explores how the cognitive and physical landscapes in which scholars conduct research, write, and teach have shaped their understandings of medieval and Renaissance English literary "oecologies." The collection strives to practice what Ursula K. Heise calls "eco-cosmopolitanism," a method that imagines forms of local environmentalism as a defense against the interventions of open-market global networks. It also expands the idea’s possibilities and identifies its limitations through critical studies of premodern texts, artefacts, and environmental history. The essays connect real environments and their imaginative (re)creations and affirm the urgency of reorienting humanity’s responsiveness to, and responsibility for, the historical links between human and non-human existence. The discussion of ways in which meditation on scholarly place and time can deepen ecocritical work offers an innovative and engaging approach that will appeal to both ecocritics generally and to medieval and early modern scholars.

Download or read book On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature written by John Kerrigan and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes essays on Shakespeare originally published 1987-1997.

Download or read book Patrons and Patron Saints in Early Modern English Literature written by Alison Chapman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book visits the fact that, in the pre-modern world, saints and lords served structurally similar roles, acting as patrons to those beneath them on the spiritual or social ladder with the word "patron" used to designate both types of elite sponsor. Chapman argues that this elision of patron saints and patron lords remained a distinctive feature of the early modern English imagination and that it is central to some of the key works of literature in the period. Writers like Jonson, Shakespeare, Spenser, Drayton, Donne and, Milton all use medieval patron saints in order to represent and to challenge early modern ideas of patronage -- not just patronage in the narrow sense of the immediate economic relations obtaining between client and sponsor, but also patronage as a society-wide system of obligation and reward that itself crystallized a whole culture’s assumptions about order and degree. The works studied in this book -- ranging from Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, written early in the 1590s, to Milton’s Masque Performed at Ludlow Castle, written in 1634 -- are patronage works, either aimed at a specific patron or showing a keen awareness of the larger patronage system. This volume challenges the idea that the early modern world had shrugged off its own medieval past, instead arguing that Protestant writers in the period were actively using the medieval Catholic ideal of the saint as a means to represent contemporary systems of hierarchy and dependence. Saints had been the ideal -- and idealized -- patrons of the medieval world and remained so for early modern English recusants. As a result, their legends and iconographies provided early modern Protestant authors with the perfect tool for thinking about the urgent and complex question of who owed allegiance to whom in a rapidly changing world.

Download or read book The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China written by Chun Mei and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-01-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cultural fascination with and imagination of theater has long been overlooked as an important historical and literary context for reading Water Margin and Journey to the West. This study focuses on the concept of “the theatrical” to read those novels and their commentaries. Imbued with performances, playacting, spectacles, and spectatorship, the early modern theatrical novel borrowed heavily from theater to conflate the theatrical and the real, juggle theatrical roles, persons, and identities, and contest orthodoxies by challenging and appropriating sites of control and authority. This study showcases the theatrical novel’s unique position as a new form of literati self-representation in response to the destabilizing social and political forces of early modern China.

Download or read book Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England written by Anne M. Myers and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our built environment inspires writers to reflect on the human experience, discover its history, or make it up. Buildings tell stories. Castles, country homes, churches, and monasteries are “documents” of the people who built them, owned them, lived and died in them, inherited and saved or destroyed them, and recorded their histories. Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England examines the relationship between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architectural and literary works. By becoming more sensitive to the narrative functions of architecture, Anne M. Myers argues, we begin to understand how a range of writers viewed and made use of the material built environment that surrounded the production of early modern texts in England. Scholars have long found themselves in the position of excusing or explaining England’s failure to achieve the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance in the visual arts. Myers proposes that architecture inspired an unusual amount of historiographic and literary production, including poetry, drama, architectural treatises, and diaries. Works by William Camden, Henry Wotton, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Anne Clifford, and John Evelyn, when considered as a group, are texts that overturn the engrained critical notion that a Protestant fear of idolatry sentenced the visual arts and architecture in England to a state of suspicion and neglect.

Download or read book Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature written by Grant Williams and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2024-06-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection reconnects the literary imagination to the early modern cognitive environment. Under the spell of post-romantic aesthetics, modernist criticism regarded the imagination as an autonomous driver of artistic production and severed its dense ties to the image, reducing the latter to a formalistic category emptied of psychological significance. But early modern writers and thinkers did not hold such views. They understood the literary image to issue from the embodied mental faculties of the author and, through its rhetorical inscription, to influence, in turn, the interiority of the reader. For both authors and readers, then, engaging with images was not a detached aesthetic experience; it was a psycho-physiological struggle fraught with ethical peril insofar as the imagination was known for its volatility and unruliness, susceptible to the dysfunction brought on by disease and bearing, at times, in Protestant England the taint of superstition and idolatry. This volume accordingly investigates the imagination’s alliances, altercations, and betrayals with rival cognitive operations based upon premodern faculty psychology.

Download or read book Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period written by Yasmin Annabel Haskell and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The early modern period was arguably the greatest 'age of the imagination' in Europe, and certainly the period in which the powers attributed to that faculty had the greatest consequences - both in theory and in ordinary people's lives. Theologians and physicians debated the reality of witchcraft (no simple battle between Religion and Science, as believers and doubters could be found on both sides); the existence and pathology of werewolves and vampires; the role of the imagination in influencing the unborn child and in causing disease even in remote others. The essays in this volume, by established and emerging scholars from diverse intellectual and cultural traditions, explore Latin and vernacular, philosophical, medical, poetic, dramatic, epistolary, and juridical sourcesto expose the tangled conceptual roots of our modern aff ective, anxiety and somatoform disorders. (some of the content)"--OCLC.

Download or read book Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture written by Kristine Steenbergh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how early modern Europeans responded to suffering and asks how they both described and practised compassion.

Download or read book Masculinity Anti Semitism and Early Modern English Literature written by Matthew Biberman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a profound re-assessment of the conceptual, rhetorical, and cultural intersections among sexuality, race and religion in English Renaissance texts, this study argues that antisemitism is a by-product of tensions between received Classical conceptions of masculinity and Christianity's strident critique of that ideal. Utilizing works by Shakespeare, Milton, Marlowe and others, Biberman illustrates how modern antisemitism develops as a way to stigmatize hypermasculine behavior, thus facilitating the transformation of the culture's gender ideal from knight to businessman. Subsequently, the function of antisemitism changes, becoming instead the mark of effeminate behavior. Consequently, the central antisemitic image changes from Jew-Devil to Jew-Sissy. Biberman traces this shift's repercussions, both in renaissance culture and what followed it. He also contends that as a result of this linkage between Jewishness and the limits of masculine behavior, the image of the Jewish woman remains especially unstable. In concluding, Biberman argues that the Gothic resurrects the Jew-Devil (bequeathing it to the Nazis), and that the horror genre is often a rewriting of Renaissance discourse about Jews. In the course of making this larger argument, Biberman introduces a series of more limited claims that challenge the conventional wisdom within the field of literary studies. First, Biberman overturns the assumption that Jewishness and femininity are always associated in the cultural imagination of Western Europe. Second, Biberman provides the historical context needed to understand the emergence of the stereotype of the pathological Jewish woman. Third, Biberman revises the incorrect notion that divorce was not practiced in Renaissance England. Fourth, Biberman argues for the novel claim that serial monogamy in Western culture is a practice understood to possess a Jewish "taint." Fifth, Biberman contributes a major advance in scholarship devoted to T. S. Eliot, illustrating how Eliot's famous critical argument against Milton is an expression of his antisemitism, and a coherent compliment to the antisemitic touches in his poetry. Sixth, in his discussion of Gothic literature, Biberman introduces novel readings of Frankenstein and Dracula, persuasively arguing that Mary Shelley's monster bears the mark of the Jew according to modern antisemitic discourse; and that, in Stoker, both the vampire and the vampire-killer represent Jews executing a scenario of self-policing that was realized in the ghettos and the concentration camps. Biberman's final contribution in this study is to provide a definition for postmodern antisemitism and to apply it to various contemporary incidents, including September 11th and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Download or read book Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England written by Jane Partner and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-09 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reveals the ways in which seventeenth-century poets used models of vision taken from philosophy, theology, scientific optics, political polemic and the visual arts to scrutinize the nature of individual perceptions and to examine poetry’s own relation to truth. Drawing on archival research, Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England brings together an innovative selection of texts and images to construct a new interdisciplinary context for interpreting the poetry of Cavendish, Traherne, Marvell and Milton. Each chapter presents a reappraisal of vision in the work of one of these authors, and these case studies also combine to offer a broader consideration of the ways that conceptions of seeing were used in poetry to explore the relations between the ‘inward’ life of the viewer and the ‘outward’ reality that lies beyond; terms that are shown to have been closely linked, through ideas about sight, with the emergence of the fundamental modern categories of the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. This book will be of interest to literary scholars, art historians and historians of science.