You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The question of selfhood in Renaissance texts constitutes a scholarly and critical debate of almost unmanageable proportions. The author of this work begins by questioning the strategies with which male writers depict powerful women. Although Spenser's Britomart, Shakespeare's Cleopatra, and Milton's Eve figure selfhood very differently and to very different ends, they do have two significant elements in common: mirrors and transformations that diminish the power of the female self.
DISSING ELIZABETH is a collection of essays focusing on criticism of Elizabeth I by her contemporaries, and considering the wide range of forms the dissenters used for their critique.
"A resource for the general reader, the student, and the scholar alike that provides easy access to a wealth of information to enhance the experience of reading the works of John Milton"--
The volume offers a variety of new interpretations of a selection of well-known and culturally established works of verbal and visual culture. It demonstrates how the two spheres of literature and broadly understood art, as well as the two qualities of old and new, interfuse, affect, re-shape, and complement each other. The focus here is particularly directed towards the perception of the canonical texts of culture by the modern, often young, addressee. Who are the Old Masters? Are contemporary works of art influenced by them? Is it possible to create ‘new classics’ without reference to the established conventions? These basic questions serve as a starting point for a stimulating academic discussion and a vibrant intellectual exchange.
Ever since Odysseus heard tales of his own exploits being retold among strangers, audiences and readers have been alive to the complications and questions arising from the translation of myth. How are myths taken and carried over into new languages, new civilizations, or new media? An international group of scholars is gathered in this volume to present diverse but connected case studies which address the artistic and political implications of the changing condition of myth – this most primal and malleable of forms. ‘Translation’ is treated broadly to encompass not only literary translation, but also the transfer of myth across cultures and epochs. In an age when the spiritual world is in crisis, Translating Myth constitutes a timely exploration of myth’s endurance, and represents a consolidation of the status of myth studies as a discipline in its own right.
For most Renaissance English thinkers, queenship was a catastrophe, a political accident that threatened to emasculate an entire nation. But some English poets and playwrights proved more inventive in their responses to female authority. In Showing Like a Queen, Katherine Eggert argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton turned the political problem of queenship to their advantage by using it as an occasion to experiment with new literary genres. Unlike other critics who have argued that a queen provoked only anxiety and defensiveness in her male subjects, Eggert demonstrates that even after her death Elizabeth I's forty-five-year reign enabled writers to entertain the fantasy of a counter...
None
This book recasts one of the most well-studied and popularly-beloved eras in history: the tumultuous span from the 1485 accession of Henry VII to the 1603 death of Elizabeth I. Though many have gravitated toward this period for its high drama and national importance, the book offers a new narrative by focusing on another facet of the British past that has exercised an equally powerful grip on audiences: imperialism. It argues that the sixteenth century was pivotal to the making of both Britain and the British Empire. Unearthing over a century of theorizing about and probing into the world beyond England’s borders, Tudor Empire shows that foreign enterprise at once mirrored, responded to, a...
Strange Communion concerns the development in Tudor culture of a tendency to identify the common good with the health of the motherland. Playwrights, polemicists, and politicians such as John Bale, Richard Morison, and William Shakespeare, among others, relied on maternal representations of England to evoke a sense of common purpose. Vanhoutte examines how such motherland tropes came to describe England, how they changed in response to specific political crises, and how they came, by the end of the sixteenth century, to shape literary ideals of masculinity. While Henrician propagandists appealed to Mother England in order to enforce dynastic privilege, their successors modified nationalist symbols as to qualify absolute monarchy. The accessions of two queens thus encouraged a convergence of nationalist and patriarchal ideologies: in late Tudor works, evocations of the national family tend to efface class distinctions while reinforcing gender distinctions. Dr. Jacqueline Vanhoutte is an assistant professor at the University of North Texas.