Download or read book Visualizing the Moral Life written by Clifford Davidson and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Allegory Space and the Material World in the Writings of Edmund Spenser written by Christopher Burlinson and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2006 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the way in which the material world is depicted in The Faerie Queene. This book provides a radical reassessment of Spenserian allegory, in particular of The Faerie Queene, in the light of contemporary historical and theoretical interests in space and material culture. It explores the ambiguous and fluctuating attention to materiality, objects, and substance in the poetics of The Faerie Queene, and discusses the way that Spenser's creation of allegorical meaning makes use of this materiality, and transforms it.It suggests further that a critical engagement with materiality (which has been so important to the recent study of early modern drama) must come, in the case of allegorical narrative, through a study of narrative and physical space, and in this context it goes on to provide a reading of the spatial dimensions of the poem - quests and battles, forests, castles and hovels - and the spatial characteristics of Spenser's other writings. The book reaffirms theneed to place Spenser in his historical contexts - philosophical and scientific, military and architectural - in early modern England, Ireland and Europe, but also provides a critical reassessment of this literary historicism. Dr CHRISTOPHER BURLINSON is a Research Fellow in English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Download or read book Staging Contemplation written by Eleanor Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-08-17 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to contemplate? In the Middle Ages, more than merely thinking with intensity, it was a religious practice entailing utter receptiveness to the divine presence. Contemplation is widely considered by scholars today to have been the highest form of devotional prayer, a rarified means of experiencing God practiced only by the most devout of monks, nuns, and mystics. Yet, in this groundbreaking new book, Eleanor Johnson argues instead for the pervasiveness and accessibility of contemplative works to medieval audiences. By drawing together ostensibly diverse literary genres—devotional prose, allegorical poetry, cycle dramas, and morality plays—Staging Contemplation paints late Middle English contemplative writing as a broad genre that operated collectively and experientially as much as through radical individual disengagement from the world. Johnson further argues that the contemplative genre played a crucial role in the exploration of the English vernacular as a literary and theological language in the fifteenth century, tracing how these works engaged modes of disfluency—from strained syntax and aberrant grammar, to puns, slang, code-switching, and laughter—to explore the limits, norms, and potential of English as a devotional language. Full of virtuoso close readings, this book demonstrates a sustained interest in how poetic language can foster a participatory experience of likeness to God among lay and devotional audiences alike.
Download or read book English Dramatic Interludes 1300 1580 written by Darryll Grantley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-05 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Darryll Grantley has created a comprehensive guide to the interlude: the extant non-cycle drama in English from the late fourteenth century up to the period in which the London commercial theatre began. As precursors of seventeenth-century drama, not only do these interludes shed important light on the technical and literary development of Shakespearean theatre, but many are also works of considerable theatrical or cultural interest in themselves. This accessible reference guide provides an entry for each of the extant interludes and fragments (c.100) typically containing an account of early editions or manuscripts; authorship and sources; modern editions; plot summary and dramatis personae; list of social issues present in the plays; verbal and dramaturgical features; songs and music; allusions and place names; stage directions and comments on staging; and modern productions, among other valuable and informative details. There are full bibliographies, indexes of characters and songs, and appendices.
Download or read book Medieval English Drama written by Sidney E. Berger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-05 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1990, Medieval English Drama is an exhaustive bibliography of scholarship on medieval English drama. Each item has been annotated in the bibliography with considerable care; these annotations are descriptive rather than critical and give a clear synopsis of the content of each reference, the texts with which it deals, and a brief indication of its critical position. The bibliography is divided into two sections; editions and collections of plays, and critical works. The bibliography is exhaustive rather than selective and provides English annotations for foreign language works, as well as a list of reviews for most books. The book covers liturgical and folk drama, other forms of entertainment, and related material useful to researchers in the field. The book provides an update of sources not listed in Carl J. Stratman's comprehensive Bibliography of Medieval Drama published in 1972.
Download or read book Renaissance Suppliants written by Leah Whittington and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renaissance Suppliants studies supplication as a social and literary event in the long European Renaissance. It argues that scenes of supplication are defining episodes in a literary tradition stretching back to Greco-Roman antiquity, taking us to the heart of fundamental questions of politics and religion, ethics and identity, sexuality and family. As a perennial mode of asymmetrical communication in moments of helplessness and extreme need, supplication speaks to ways that people live together despite grave inequalities. It is a strategy that societies use to regulate and perpetuate themselves, to negotiate conflict, and to manage situations in which relationships threaten to unravel. All the writers discussed here—Vergil, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Milton—find supplication indispensable for thinking about problems of antagonism, difference, and hierarchy, bringing the aesthetic resources of supplicatory interactions to bear on their unique literary and cultural circumstances. The opening chapters establish a conceptual framework for thinking about supplication as facilitating transitions between states of feeling and positions of relative status, beginning with Homer and classical literature. Vergil's Aeneid is paradigmatic instance in which literary and social structures of the ancient past are transformed to suit the needs of the present, and supplication becomes a figure for the act of cultural translation. Subsequent chapters take up different aspects of Renaissance supplicatory discourse, showing how postures of humiliation and abjection are appropriated and transformed in erotic poetry, drama, and epic. The book ends with Milton who invests gestures of self-abasement with unexpected dignity.
Download or read book Theater of the Word written by Julie Paulson and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play, Julie Paulson sheds new light on medieval constructions of the self as they emerge from within a deeply sacramental culture. The book examines the medieval morality play, a genre that explicitly addresses the question of what it means to be human and takes up the ritual traditions of confession and penance, long associated with medieval interiority, as its primary subjects. The morality play is allegorical drama, a “theater of the word," that follows a penitential progression in which an everyman figure falls into sin and is eventually redeemed through penitential ritual. Written during an era of reform when the ritual life of the medieval Church was under scrutiny, the morality plays as a whole insist upon a self that is first and foremost performed—constructed, articulated, and known through ritual and other communal performances that were interwoven into the fabric of medieval life. This fascinating look at the genre of the morality play will be of keen interest to scholars of medieval drama and to those interested in late medieval culture, sacramentalism, penance and confession, the history of the self, and theater and performance.
Download or read book Everyman and Mankind written by Douglas Bruster and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyman and Mankind are morality plays which mark the turn of the medieval period to the early modern, with their focus on the individual. Everyman follows a man's journey towards death and his efforts to secure himself a life thereafter, whilst Mankind shows a man battling with temptation and sin, often with great humour. Both texts are modernised here and edited to the highest standards of scholarship, with full on-page commentaries giving the depth of information and insight associated with all Arden editions. The comprehensive, illustrated introduction argues that the plays signal the birth of the early modern consciousness and puts them in their historic and religious contexts. An account is also given of the staging and performance history of the plays and their critical history and significance. With a wealth of helpful and incisive commentary this is the finest edition of the plays available.
Download or read book New England Journal of Education written by and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 1446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reader s Guide to Literature in English written by Mark Hawkins-Dady and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 1024 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.
Download or read book Journal of Education written by and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Drama in Early Tudor Britain 1485 1558 written by Howard B. Norland and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A time of great changes after nearly a century of foreign wars and civil strife, the Tudor era witnessed a significant transformation of dramatic art. Medieval traditions were modified by the forces of humanism and the Reformation, and a renewed interest in classical models inspired experimentation. Howard B. Norland examines Tudor plays performed between 1485 and 1558, a time when drama reached beyond local, popular, and religious contexts to treat more varied and more secular concerns, culminating in the emergence of comedy and tragedy as major genres. The theater also imported dramas from the Continent, adapting them to English tastes. After establishing the popular dramatic traditions of fifteenth-century Britain, Norland discusses the critical interpretation of the Latin plays of Terence studied in the schools and the views of influential authors such as Erasmus, Vives, and More about what drama should be and do. The heart of the book is its in-depth analyses of individual plays. Norland examines the secularization of the morality play in Skelton's Magnificence, Bale's King John, Respublica, and Redford's Wit and Science and he traces the changes in comic form from Medwall's Fulgens and Lucres through Calisto and Melebea and Johan Johan to Udall's Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle. The final section examines the first tragedies written in England: Watson's Absolom, Christopherson's Jephthah, and Grimald's Archipropheta. Howard B. Norland is a professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His articles have appeared in Genre, Sixteenth Century Journal, Fifteenth Century Studies, Comparative Drama, and Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Download or read book Reading in the Wilderness written by Jessica Brantley and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just as twenty-first-century technologies like blogs and wikis have transformed the once private act of reading into a public enterprise, devotional reading experiences in the Middle Ages were dependent upon an oscillation between the solitary and the communal. In Reading in the Wilderness, Jessica Brantley uses tools from both literary criticism and art history to illuminate Additional MS 37049, an illustrated Carthusian miscellany housed in the British Library. This revealing artifact, Brantley argues, closes the gap between group spectatorship and private study in late medieval England. Drawing on the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael Camille, and others working at the image-text crossroads, Reading in the Wilderness addresses the manuscript’s texts and illustrations to examine connections between reading and performance within the solitary monk’s cell and also outside. Brantley reimagines the medieval codex as a site where the meanings of images and words are performed, both publicly and privately, in the act of reading.
Download or read book Innovation and Visualization written by Amy Ione and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amy Ione’s Innovation and Visualization is the first in detail account that relates the development of visual images to innovations in art, communication, scientific research, and technological advance. Integrated case studies allow Ione to put aside C.P. Snow’s “two culture” framework in favor of cross-disciplinary examples that refute the science/humanities dichotomy. The themes, which range from cognitive science to illuminated manuscripts and media studies, will appeal to specialists (artists, art historians, cognitive scientists, etc.) interested in comparing our image saturated culture with the environments of earlier eras. The scope of the examples will appeal to the generalist.
Download or read book Journal of Education written by Thomas Williams Bicknell and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 1440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints written by Theresa Coletti and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sinner-saint who embraced then renounced sexual and worldly pleasures; a woman who, through her attachment to Jesus, embodied both erotic and sacred power; a symbol of penance and an exemplar of contemplative and passionate devotion: perhaps no figure stood closer to the center of late medieval debates about the sources of spiritual authority and women's contribution to salvation history than did Mary Magdalene, and perhaps nowhere in later medieval England was cultural preoccupation with the Magdalene stronger than in fifteenth-century East Anglia. Looking to East Anglian texts including the N-Town Plays, The Book of Margery Kempe, The Revelations of Julian of Norwich, and Bokenham's Legend of Holy Women, Theresa Coletti explores how the gendered symbol of Mary Magdalene mediates tensions between masculine and feminine spiritual power, institutional and individual modes of religious expression, and authorized and unauthorized forms of revelation and sacred speech. Using the Digby play Mary Magdalene as her touchstone, Coletti engages a wide variety of textual and visual resources to make evident the discursive and material ties of East Anglian dramatic texts and feminine religion to broader traditions of cultural commentary and representation. In bringing the disciplinary perspectives of literary history and criticism, gender studies, and social and religious history to bear on specific local instances of dramatic practice, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints highlights the relevance of Middle English dramatic discourse to the dynamic religious climate of late medieval England. In doing so, the book decisively challenges the marginalization of drama within medieval English studies, elucidates vernacular theater's kinship with influential late medieval religious texts and institutions, and articulates the changing possibilities for sacred representation in the decades before the Reformation.
Download or read book Humanism and Good Books in Sixteenth Century England written by Katherine C. Little and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-23 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores sixteenth-century humanism as an origin for the idea of literature as good, even great, books. It argues that humanists located the value of books not only in the goodness of their writing-their eloquence—but also in their capacity to shape readers in good and bad behavior, thoughts, and feelings, in other words, in their morality. To approach humanism in this way, by attending to its moral interests, is to provide a new perspective on periodization, the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance / early modern. That is, humanists did not so much rupture with medieval ideas about literature or with medieval models as they adapted and altered them, offering a new confidence about an old idea: the moral instructiveness of pagan, classical texts for Christian readers. This revaluation of literature was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, humanist confidence inspired authors to invent their own good books—good in style and morals—in morality plays such as Everyman and the Christian Terence tradition and in educational treatises such as Sir Thomas Elyot's Boke of the Governour. On the other hand, humanism placed a new burden on authors, requiring their work to teach and delight. In the wake of humanism, authors struggled to articulate the value of their work for readers, returning to a pre-humanist path that they associated with Geoffrey Chaucer. This medieval-inflected doubt pervades the late sixteenth-century writings of the most prolific and influential Elizabethans-Robert Greene, George Gascoigne, and Edmund Spenser.
