Sympathy in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Sympathy in Early Modern Literature and Culture PDF Author: Richard Meek
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009280279
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive study of sympathy in the early modern period, providing a deeply researched and interdisciplinary examination of its development in Anglophone literature and culture. It argues that the term sympathy was used to refer to an active and imaginative sharing of affect considerably earlier than previous critical and historical accounts have suggested. Investigating a wide range of texts and genres, including prose fiction, sermons, poetic complaint, drama, political tracts, and scientific treatises, Richard Meek demonstrates the ways in which sympathy in the period is bound up with larger debates about society, religion, and identity. He also reveals the extent to which early modern emotions were not simply humoral or grounded in the body, but rather relational, comparative, and intertextual. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Renaissance literature and history, the history of emotions, and the history and philosophy of science.

Sympathy in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Sympathy in Early Modern Literature and Culture PDF Author: Richard Meek
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009280279
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book

Book Description
This is the first comprehensive study of sympathy in the early modern period, providing a deeply researched and interdisciplinary examination of its development in Anglophone literature and culture. It argues that the term sympathy was used to refer to an active and imaginative sharing of affect considerably earlier than previous critical and historical accounts have suggested. Investigating a wide range of texts and genres, including prose fiction, sermons, poetic complaint, drama, political tracts, and scientific treatises, Richard Meek demonstrates the ways in which sympathy in the period is bound up with larger debates about society, religion, and identity. He also reveals the extent to which early modern emotions were not simply humoral or grounded in the body, but rather relational, comparative, and intertextual. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Renaissance literature and history, the history of emotions, and the history and philosophy of science.

Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture PDF Author: Katherine Ibbett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108856438
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
This collection is an enquiry into compassion as an early modern emotional phenomenon, situating it within the complexity of European economic, social, cultural and religious tensions. Drawing on recent work in the history of emotions, leading scholars consider the particularities of early modern compassion, demonstrating its entanglements with diverse genres and geographies. Chapters on canonical and less familiar works explore tragedy, comedy, sermons, philosophy, treatises on consolation, medical writing, and dramatic theory, showing how early modern compassion shaped attitudes and social structures that remain central to the way we imagine our response to suffering today, and how such investigations can ultimately provoke new ways of thinking about community in contemporary Europe.

Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture PDF Author: Kristine Steenbergh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108495397
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Explores how early modern Europeans responded to suffering and asks how they both described and practised compassion.

Shakespeare Against War

Shakespeare Against War PDF Author: Robert White
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 139951623X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Whilst Shakespearean drama provides eloquent calls to war, more often than not these are undercut or outweighed by compelling appeals to peaceful alternatives conveyed through narrative structure, dramatic context and poetic utterance. Placing Shakespeare's works in the history of pacifist thought, Robert White argues that Shakespeare's plays consistently challenge appeals to heroism and revenge and reveal the brutal futility of war. White also examines Shakespeare's interest in the mental states of military officers when their ingrained training is tested in love relationships. In imagery and themes, war infiltrates love, with problematical consequences, reflected in Shakespeare's comedies, histories and tragedies alike. Challenging a critical orthodoxy that military engagement in war is an inevitable and necessary condition, White draws analogies with the experience of modern warfare, showing the continuing relevance of Shakespeare's plays which deal with basic issues of war and peace that are still evident.

Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature and Culture PDF Author: Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen
Publisher: D. S. Brewer
ISBN: 9781843843306
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
An examination of the themes of pain and compassion in key Renaissance writers, at a time when religious attitudes to suffering were changing.

Boundaries of Violence in Early Modern England

Boundaries of Violence in Early Modern England PDF Author: Samantha Dressel
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000933482
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
This book explores the possibilities and limitations of violence on the Early Modern stage and in the Early Modern world. This collection is divided into three sections: History-cal Violence, (Un)Comic Violence, and Revenge Violence. This division allows scholars to easily find intertextual materials; comic violence may function similarly across multiple comedies but is vastly different from most tragic violence. While the source texts move beyond Shakespeare, this book follows the classic division of Shakespeare’s plays into history, comedy, and tragedy. Each section of the book contains one chapter engaging with modern dramatic practice along with several that take textual or historical approaches. This wide-ranging approach means that the book will be appropriate both for specialists in Early Modern violence who are looking across multiple perspectives, and for students or scholars researching texts or approaches.

Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture

Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture PDF Author: Cora Fox
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526137151
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
What did it mean to be happy in early modern Europe? Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture includes essays that reframe historical understandings of emotional life in the Renaissance, focusing on under-studied feelings such as mirth, solidarity, and tranquillity. Methodologically diverse and interdisciplinary, these essays draw from the history of emotions, affect theory and the contemporary social and cognitive sciences to reveal rich and sustained cultural attention in the early modern period to these positive feelings. The book also highlights culturally distinct negotiations of the problematic binary between what constitutes positive and negative emotions. A comprehensive introduction and afterword open multiple paths for research into the histories of good feeling and their significances for understanding present constructions of happiness and wellbeing.

Sympathy

Sympathy PDF Author: Eric Schliesser
Publisher: Oxford Philosophical Concepts
ISBN: 0199928894
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
This volume offers a historical overview of some of the most significant attempts to come to grips with sympathy in Western thought from Plato to experimental economics. The contributors are leading scholars in philosophy, classics, history, economics, comparative literature, and political science.

Feeling British

Feeling British PDF Author: Evan Gottlieb
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838756782
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Feeling British argues that the discourse of sympathy both encourages and problematizes a sense of shared national identity in eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature and culture. Although the 1707 Act of Union officially joined England and Scotland, government policy alone could not overcome centuries of feuding and ill will between these nations. Accordingly, the literary public sphere became a vital arena for the development and promotion of a new national identity, Britishness. Feeling British starts by examining the political implications of the Scottish Enlightenment's theorizations of sympathy the mechanism by which emotions are shared between people. From these philosophical beginnings, this study tracks how sympathetic discourse is deployed by a variety of authors - including Defoe, Smollett, Johnson, Wordsworth, and Scott - invested in constructing, but also in questioning, an inclusive sense of what it means to be British.

Shakespeare's Contagious Sympathies

Shakespeare's Contagious Sympathies PDF Author: Eric Langley
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198821840
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Understanding the early-modern subject to be constituted, as Shakespeare's Ulysses explains, by its communications with others, this study considers what happens when these conceptions of compassionate communication and sympathetic exchange are comprehensively undermined by period anxieties concerning contagion and the transmission of disease. Allowing that 'no man is . . . any thing' until he has 'communicate[d] his parts to others', can these formative communications still be risked in a world preoccupied by communicable sickness, where every contact risks contraction, where every touch could be the touch of plague, where kind interaction could facilitate cruel infection, and where to commiserate is to risk 'miserable dependence'? Counting the cost of compassion, this study of Shakespeare's plays and poetry analyses how medical explanations of disease impact upon philosophical conceptions and literary depictions of his characters who find themselves precariously implicated within a world of ill communications. It examines the influence of scientific thought upon the history of the subject, and explores how Shakespearealive to both the importance and dangers of sympathetic communicationarticulates an increasing sense of both the pragmatic benefits of monadic thought, emotional isolation, and subjective quarantine, while offering his account of the considerable loss involved when we lose faith in vulnerable, tender, and open existence.