The Places of Early Modern Criticism

The Places of Early Modern Criticism
Author: Gavin Alexander
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2021
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198834683

What is criticism? And where is it to be found? Thinking about literature and the visual arts is found in many places - in treatises, apologies, and paragoni; in prefaces, letters, and essays; in commentaries, editions, reading notes, and commonplace books; in images, sculptures, and built spaces; within or on the thresholds of works of poetry and visual art. It is situated between different disciplines and methods. Critical ideas and methods come into England from other countries, and take root in particular locations - the court, the Inns of Court, the theatre, the great house, the printer's shop, the university. The practice of criticism is transplanted to the Americas and attempts to articulate the place of poetry in a new world. And commonplaces of classical poetics and rhetoric serve both to connect and to measure the space between different critical discourses. Tracing the history of the development of early modern thinking about literature and the visual arts requires consideration of various kinds of place - material, textual, geographical - and the practices particular to those places; it also requires that those different places be brought into dialogue with each other. This book brings together scholars working in departments of English, modern languages, and art history to look at the many different places of early modern criticism. It argues polemically for the necessity of looking afresh at the scope of criticism, and at what happens on its margins; and for interrogating our own critical practices and disciplinary methods by investigating their history.

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage
Author: Andrew Bozio
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2020-02-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 019258572X

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage argues that environment and embodied thought continually shaped one another in the performance of early modern English drama. It demonstrates this, first, by establishing how characters think through their surroundings — not only how they orient themselves within unfamiliar or otherwise strange locations, but also how their environs function as the scaffolding for perception, memory, and other forms of embodied thought. It then contends that these moments of thinking through place theorise and thematise the work that playgoers undertook in reimagining the stage as the setting of the dramatic fiction. By tracing the relationship between these two registers of thought in such plays as The Malcontent, Dido Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine, King Lear, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and Bartholomew Fair, this book shows that drama makes visible the often invisible means by which embodied subjects acquire a sense of their surroundings. It also reveals how, in doing so, theatre altered the way that playgoers perceived, experienced, and imagined place in early modern England.

The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy

The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy
Author: Adam Zucker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2011-03-10
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1107003083

An exploration of wit, witlessness and social and comic conventions in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson and their contemporaries.

Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance

Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance
Author: Tim Fitzpatrick
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1317079787

Analyzing Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts for their spatial implications, this innovative study discloses the extent to which the resources and constraints of public playhouse buildings affected the construction of the fictional worlds of early modern plays. The study argues that playwrights were writing with foresight, inscribing the constraints and resources of the stages into their texts. It goes further, to posit that Shakespeare and his playwright-contemporaries adhered to a set of generic conventions, rather than specific local company practices, about how space and place were to be related in performance: the playwrights constituted thus an overarching virtual 'company' producing playtexts that shared features across the acting companies and playhouses. By clarifying a sixteenth- to seventeenth-century conception of theatrical place, Tim Fitzpatrick adds a new layer of meaning to our understanding of the plays. His approach adds a new dimension to these particular documents which-though many of them are considered of great literary worth-were not originally generated for any other reason than to be performed within a specific performance context. The fact that the playwrights were aware of the features of this performance tradition makes their texts a potential mine of performance information, and casts light back on the texts themselves: if some of their meanings are 'spatial', these will have been missed by purely literary tools of analysis.

Early Modern English Poetry

Early Modern English Poetry
Author: Patrick Cheney
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

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.

Geoparsing Early Modern English Drama

Geoparsing Early Modern English Drama
Author: M. Matei-Chesnoiu
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2015-12-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137469412

Geo-spatial identity and early Modern European drama come together in this study of how cultural or political attachments are actively mediated through space. Matei-Chesnoiu traces the modulated representations of rivers, seas, mountains, and islands in sixteenth-century plays by Shakespeare, Jasper Fisher, Thomas May, and others.

Producing Early Modern London

Producing Early Modern London
Author: Kelly J. Stage
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2018-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496201817

"Producing Early Modern London analyzes theater's use of city spaces and places, showing how the satirical comedies of the early seventeenth century came to embody the city as the city embodied the plays"--

Early Modern Visions of Space

Early Modern Visions of Space
Author: Dorothea Heitsch
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 458
Release: 2021-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 146966741X

How writers respond to a cosmology in evolution in the sixteenth century and how literature and space implicate each other are the guiding issues of this volume in which sixteen authors explore the topic of space in its multiform incarnations and representations. The volume's first section features the early modern exploration and codification of urban and rural spaces as well as maritime and industrial expanses: "Space and Territory: Geographies in Texts" thus contributes to a history of spatial consciousness. The construction of local, national, political, public, and private places is highlighted in "Space and Politics: Literary Geographies"; the contributors in this segment show how built forms as architectural or literary constructions and spatial orientation are intertwined. "Space and Gender: Geopoetical Approaches" traces the experience of gender as political, territorial, and communicative exploration; the essays in this division deal with social organization and its symbolic analysis, resulting in literary texts featuring what could be called psychological production theories. The development of ethical approaches adapted to or critical of colonial expansion is analyzed in "Space and Ethics: Geocritical Ventures"; here we encounter early modern globalization where locals, explorers, immigrants, adventurers, and intellectuals remake themselves in new places, engage in or meet with resistance, or attempt to rework local sociopolitical systems while reassessing those they are familiar with. "The Space of the Book, the Book as Space: Printing, Reading, Publishing" analyzes the tactile object of the book as an arena for commerce, politics, and authorial experimentation.