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The essays in this volume explore the Mediterranean both as a physical and cultural space, and as a conceptual notion that challenges the boundaries between East and West. It emphasizes the Ottoman Mediterranean, by exploring a variety of literary and non-literary texts produced between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth centuries.
This volume breaks new ground in the exploration of Anglo-Italian cultural relations: it presents analyses of a wide range of early modern Italian texts adapted into contemporary English culture, often through intermediary French translations. When transposed into English, their Italian origin was frequently categorized as marvellous and consequently censured because of its strangeness: thus, English translators often gave their public a moralized and tamed version of Italy’s uniqueness. This volume’s contributors show that an effective way of moralizing Italian custom was to exoticize its origins, in order to protect the English public from an Italianate influence. This ubiquitous moralization is visible in the evolution of the concept of tragedy, and in the overtly educational aim acquired by the Italian novella, adapted for an allegedly female audience. Through the analysis of various literary genres (novella, epic poem, play, essay), the volume focuses on the mechanisms of appropriation and rejection of Italian culture through imported topoi and narremes.
Knights in Arms moves beyond the best-known examples of the genre, such as Philip Sidney'sArcadia, to consider the broad range of texts which featured the Eastern Mediterranean in this era.
Cover -- Half Title -- Titel Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 "Unquiet all night": Curtain Lectures and a Wife's Speech to Her Husband -- 2 "Their whispers, one in another's ear": Imagining Private Speech Between Women -- 3 "I know thy thoughts": Witches Speak to Their Audiences -- 4 Regret, Reconsideration, and Reclamation: Audiences Witness Women's Death Speech -- Afterword -- Index
This study examines the structural similarities between English mercantile treatises and drama c1600-1642. Bradley D. Ryner analyses the representational conventions of plays and mercantile treatises written between the chartering of the English East India Company in 1600 and the closing of the public playhouses at the outset of the English Civil War in 1642. He shows that playwrights' manipulation of specific elements of theatrical representation - such as metaphor, props, dramatic character, stage space, audience interaction, and genre - exacerbated the tension between the aspects of the world taken into account by a particular representation and those aspects that it neglects.
Emphasizing a performative and stage-centered approach, this book considers early modern European theater as an international phenomenon. Early modern theater was remarkable both in the ways that it represented material and symbolic exchanges across borders but also in the ways that it enacted them. In analyzing theater as a medium of dialogic communication, the volume emphasizes cultural relationships of exchange and reciprocity more than unilateral encounters of hegemony and domination.
Narrative Structure and Reader Formation in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania offers the first systematic formal and thematic analysis of Wroth’s Urania in its historical context and explores the structural means by which Wroth fashions her readership. The book thus has a dual focus, at once on narrative art and reader formation. It makes two original claims, the first being that the Urania is not the unorganized accumulation of stories critics have tended to present it as, but a work of sophisticated narrative structures i.e. a complex text in a positive sense. These structures are revealed by means of a circumspect narratological analysis of the formal and thematic patterns that organise the Ur...
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.
This collection of essays situates George Gascoigne in context as the pre-eminent writer of the early part of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. His ceaseless experimentation was hugely influential on those later Elizabethans - including Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare - who represent the great flowering of the English literary renaissance. Gascoigne rarely returned to a genre, writing prose fiction, blank verse, plays, sonnets, narrative verse, courtly entertainments, satire and many other literary forms, and the later Elizabethans were fully aware of his significance. These essays are organised into three main sections: influences upon Gascoigne, such as Skelton; Gascoigne’s influence on others, including Spenser; and finally a reassessment of his critical neglect and the story behind his marginalised status in the English literary canon. As only the second multi-authored essay collection on Gascoigne, this book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of this important and often misunderstood writer.