Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature

Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature
Author: Anita Gilman Sherman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2021-04-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108905358

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.

Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures

Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures
Author: L. Calè
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2009-12-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230297390

Paying attention to the historically specific dimensions of objects such as the photograph, the illustrated magazine and the collection, the contributors to this volume offer new ways of thinking about nineteenth-century practices of reading, viewing, and collecting, revealing new readings of Wordsworth, Shelley, James and Wilde, among others.

The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama

The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama
Author: Nora Johnson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2003-06-26
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780521824163

Nora Johnson's study of actors who wrote plays in early modern England uncovers important links between performance and authorship. The book traces the careers of Robert Armin, Nathan Field, Anthony Munday and Thomas Heywood, actors who were powerfully interested in marketing themselves as authors and celebrities; but Johnson contends that authorship as they constructed it had little to do with modern ideas of control and ownership. Finally, the book repositions Shakespeare in relation to actors, considering Shakespeare's famous silence about his own work as one strategy among many available to writers for the stage. The Actor as Playwright provides an alternative to the debate between traditional and materialist readers of early modern dramatic authorship, arguing that both approaches are weakened by a reluctance to look outside the Shakespearean canon for evidence.

Shaky Ground

Shaky Ground
Author: Elizabeth Marlowe
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2013-10-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472502094

The recent crisis in the world of antiquities collecting has prompted scholars and the general public to pay more attention than ever before to the archaeological findspots and collecting histories of ancient artworks. This new scrutiny is applied to works currently on the market as well as to those acquired since (and despite) the 1970 UNESCO Convention, which aimed to prevent the trafficking in cultural property. When it comes to famous works that have been in major museums for many generations, however, the matter of their origins is rarely considered. Canonical pieces like the Barberini Togatus or the Fonseca bust of a Flavian lady appear in many scholarly studies and virtually every textbook on Roman art. But we have no more certainty about these works' archaeological contexts than we do about those that surface on the market today. This book argues that the current legal and ethical debates over looting, ownership and cultural property have distracted us from the epistemological problems inherent in all (ostensibly) ancient artworks lacking a known findspot, problems that should be of great concern to those who seek to understand the past through its material remains.

Imagining the Darwinian Revolution

Imagining the Darwinian Revolution
Author: Ian Hesketh
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2022-06-14
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822988720

This volume considers the relationship between the development of evolution and its historical representations by focusing on the so-called Darwinian Revolution. The very idea of the Darwinian Revolution is a historical construct devised to help explain the changing scientific and cultural landscape that was ushered in by Charles Darwin’s singular contribution to natural science. And yet, since at least the 1980s, science historians have moved away from traditional “great man” narratives to focus on the collective role that previously neglected figures have played in formative debates of evolutionary theory. Darwin, they argue, was not the driving force behind the popularization of evolution in the nineteenth century. This volume moves the conversation forward by bringing Darwin back into the frame, recognizing that while he was not the only important evolutionist, his name and image came to signify evolution itself, both in the popular imagination as well as in the work and writings of other evolutionists. Together, contributors explore how the history of evolution has been interpreted, deployed, and exploited to fashion the science behind our changing understandings of evolution from the nineteenth century to the present.

The Cannibal Hymn

The Cannibal Hymn
Author: Christopher Eyre
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780853237068

The Cannibal Hymn forms a self-standing episode in the ritual anthology that makes up the Pyramid Texts, first appearing in the tomb of Unas at the end of the Fifth Dynasty. Its style and format are characteristic of the oral-recitational poetry of pharaonic Egypt, marked by allusive metaphor and the exploitation of wordplay and homophony in its verbal recreation of a butchery ritual. Christopher Eyre examines the text of the Cannibal Hymn in its performative and cultural context: the detailed mythologization of the sacrificial process in this hymn poses key questions about the nature of rites of passage and rituals of sacrifice in Egypt, and in particular about the mobilization of oral accompaniment to ritual actions.

Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture

Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture
Author: Maja Bondestam
Publisher:
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2020-11-09
Genre:
ISBN: 9789463721745

Drawing on a rich array of textual and visual primary sources-including medicine, satire, play script, dictionaries, natural philosophy, and texts on collecting wonders-this book provides a fresh perspective on monstrosity in early modern European culture. The essays explore how exceptional bodies challenged social, religious, sexual and natural structures and hierarchies in the sixteenth-, seventeenth- and early eighteenth centuries and contributed to its knowledge, virtue and emotional repertoire. Prodigious births, maternal imagination, hermaphrodites, collections of extraordinary things, powerful women, disabilities, controversial exercise, shapeshifting phenomena, and hybrids of different kinds are examined in a period before all deviances became normalized, in the sense, close and relative to a homogenous standard. The historicizing of exceptional bodies is central in the volume since it brings out the early modern culture and deepen our knowledge of its specific ways of conceptualizing singularities, rare examples, paradoxes, rules and conventions in nature and society.

The Memory Arts in Renaissance England

The Memory Arts in Renaissance England
Author: William E. Engel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2016-08-18
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107086817

Anthology of a selection of early modern works on memory.