The Mysterious and the Foreign in Early Modern England

The Mysterious and the Foreign in Early Modern England PDF Author: Helen Ostovich
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 0874139546
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
"The essays collected in this volume explore many of the most interesting, and some of the more surprising, reactions of English people in the early modern period to their encounters with the mysterious and the foreign. In this period the small and peripheral nation of English speakers first explored the distant world from the Arctic, to the tropics of the Americas, to the exotic East, and snowy wastes of Russia, recording its impressions and adventures in an equally wide variety of literary genres. Nearer home, fresh encounters with the mysterious world of the Ottoman Empire and the lure of the Holy Land, and, of course, with the evocative wonders of Italy, provide equally rich accounts for the consumption of a reading and theatergoing public. This growing public proved to be, in some cases, naive and gullible, in others urbanely sophisticated in its reactions to "otherness," or frankly incredulous of travelers' tales."--BOOK JACKET.

The Mysterious and the Foreign in Early Modern England

The Mysterious and the Foreign in Early Modern England PDF Author: Helen Ostovich
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 0874139546
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book

Book Description
"The essays collected in this volume explore many of the most interesting, and some of the more surprising, reactions of English people in the early modern period to their encounters with the mysterious and the foreign. In this period the small and peripheral nation of English speakers first explored the distant world from the Arctic, to the tropics of the Americas, to the exotic East, and snowy wastes of Russia, recording its impressions and adventures in an equally wide variety of literary genres. Nearer home, fresh encounters with the mysterious world of the Ottoman Empire and the lure of the Holy Land, and, of course, with the evocative wonders of Italy, provide equally rich accounts for the consumption of a reading and theatergoing public. This growing public proved to be, in some cases, naive and gullible, in others urbanely sophisticated in its reactions to "otherness," or frankly incredulous of travelers' tales."--BOOK JACKET.

Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds

Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds PDF Author: L. McJannet
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230119824
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The essays in this book analyze a range of genres and considers geographical areas beyond the Ottoman Empire to deepen our post-Saidian understanding of the complexity of real and imagined "traffic" between England and the "Islamic worlds" it encountered and constructed.

Travel and Drama in Early Modern England

Travel and Drama in Early Modern England PDF Author: Claire Jowitt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108678742
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This agenda-setting volume on travel and drama in early modern England provides new insights into Renaissance stage practice, performance history, and theatre's transnational exchanges. It advances our understanding of theatre history, drama's generic conventions, and what constitutes plays about travel at a time when the professional theatre was rapidly developing and England was attempting to announce its presence within a global economy. Recent critical studies have shown that the reach of early modern travel was global in scope, and its cultural consequences more important than narratives that are dominated by the Atlantic world suggest. This collection of essays by world-leading scholars redefines the field by expanding the canon of recognized plays concerned with travel. Re-assessing the parameters of the genre, the chapters offer fresh perspectives on how these plays communicated with their audiences and readers.

Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama

Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama PDF Author: Murat Ögütcü
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350300462
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Despite the popularity of plays about the East, the representation of the East in early modern drama has been either overlooked, marginalized as footnotes or generalized into stereotypes. Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama focuses on the multi-layered, often conflicting and changing perceptions of the East and how dramatic works made use of their respective theatrical space to represent the concept of the East in drama. This volume re-examines the (mis)representation of the East on the early modern English outdoor and indoor stage and broadens our understanding of early modern theatrical productions beyond Shakespeare and the European continent. It traces the origin of conventional depictions of the East to university dramas and explores how they influenced the commercial stage. Chapters uncover how conflicting representations of the East were communicated on stage through the material aspects of stage architecture, costumes and performance effects. The collection emphasizes these material aspects of dramatic performances and showcases neglected plays, including George Salterne's Tomumbeius, Robert Greene's The Historie of Orlando Furioso and Joseph Simons' Leo the Armenian, and puts them in conversation with William Shakespeare's The Tempest and John Fletcher's The Island Princess.

Retelling the Siege of Jerusalem in Early Modern England

Retelling the Siege of Jerusalem in Early Modern England PDF Author: Vanita Neelakanta
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 1644530147
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This compelling book explores sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English retellings of the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the way they informed and were informed by religious and political developments. The siege featured prominently in many early modern English sermons, ballads, plays, histories, and pamphlets, functioning as a touchstone for writers who sought to locate their own national drama of civil and religious tumult within a larger biblical and post-biblical context. Reformed England identified with besieged Jerusalem, establishing an equivalency between the Protestant church and the ancient Jewish nation but exposing fears that a displeased God could destroy his beloved nation. As print culture grew, secular interpretations of the siege ran alongside once-dominant providentialist narratives and spoke to the political anxieties in England as it was beginning to fashion a conception of itself as a nation. Distributed for the University of Delaware Press

Greeks and Trojans on the Early Modern English Stage

Greeks and Trojans on the Early Modern English Stage PDF Author: Lisa Hopkins
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501514628
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
No story was more interesting to Shakespeare and his contemporaries than that of Troy, partly because the story of Troy was in a sense the story of England, since the Trojan prince Aeneas was supposedly the ancestor of the Tudors. This book explores the wide range of allusions to Greece and Troy in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, looking not only at plays actually set in Greece or Troy but also those which draw on characters and motifs from Greek mythology and the Trojan War. Texts covered include Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles and The Tempest as well as plays by other authors of the period including Marlowe, Chettle, Ford and Beaumont and Fletcher.

Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture PDF Author: L. Noble
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230118615
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The human body, traded, fragmented and ingested is at the centre of Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture , which explores the connections between early modern literary representations of the eaten body and the medical consumption of corpses.

Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater

Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater PDF Author: Ronda Arab
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317690702
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays such as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday together with understudied texts such as court entertainments, and examining topics ranging from dramatic celebrity to women’s political agency to the parental emotion of grief, this volume provides a fresh and at times provocative assessment of the "historical affects"—financial, emotional, and socio-political—that transformed Renaissance theater. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive theoretical or philosophical contexts, the essays in this volume ask readers to consider how drama emplaces the most personal, unspeakable passions in matrices defined in part by financial exchange, by erotic desire, by gender, by the material body, and by theatricality itself. As it encourages this conversation to take place, the collection provides scholars and students alike with a series of new perspectives, not only on the plays, emotions, and histories discussed in its pages, but also on broader shifts and pressures animating literary studies today.

Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World

Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World PDF Author: Tracey A. Sowerby
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192572636
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary volume explores core emerging themes in the study of early modern literary-diplomatic relations, developing essential methods of analysis and theoretical approaches that will shape future research in the field. Contributions focus on three intimately related areas: the impact of diplomatic protocol on literary production; the role of texts in diplomatic practice, particularly those that operated as 'textual ambassadors'; and the impact of changes in the literary sphere on diplomatic culture. The literary sphere held such a central place because it gave diplomats the tools to negotiate the pervasive ambiguities of diplomacy; simultaneously literary depictions of diplomacy and international law provided genre-shaped places for cultural reflection on the rapidly changing and expanding diplomatic sphere. Translations exemplify the potential of literary texts both to provoke competition and to promote cultural convergence between political communities, revealing the existence of diplomatic third spaces in which ritual, symbolic, or written conventions and semantics converged despite particular oppositions and differences. The increasing public consumption of diplomatic material in Europe illuminates diplomatic and literary communities, and exposes the translocal, as well as the transnational, geographies of literary-diplomatic exchanges. Diplomatic texts possessed symbolic capital. They were produced, archived, and even redeployed in creative tension with the social and ceremonial worlds that produced them. Appreciating the generic conventions of specific types of diplomatic texts can radically reshape our interpretation of diplomatic encounters, just as exploring the afterlives of diplomatic records can transform our appreciation of the histories and literatures they inspired.

Women Writing Back / Writing Women Back

Women Writing Back / Writing Women Back PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004193537
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Privileging both a transnational and a sociological approach, this volume explores the position of women in the early modern literary field, emphasising the international scope of their literature and examining their historical position, influence, network and dialogues.