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Performing Maternity in Early Modern England features essays that share a common concern with exploring maternity's cultural representation, performative aspects and practical consequences in the period from 1540-1690. The essays interrogate how early modern texts depict fertility, conception, delivery and gendered constructions of maternity by analyzing a wealth of historical documents and images in conjunction with dramatic and non-dramatic literary texts. They emphasize that the embodied, repeated and public nature of maternity defines it as inherently performative and ultimately central to the production of gender identity during the early modern period.
This volume analyzes early modern cultural representations of children and childhood through the literature and drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Contributors include leading international scholars of the English Renaissance whose essays consider asexuals and sodomites, roaring girls and schoolboys, precocious princes and raucous tomboys, boy actors and female apprentices, while discussing a broad array of topics, from animal studies to performance theory, from queer time to queer fat, from teaching strategies to casting choices, and from metamorphic sex changes to rape and cannibalism. The collection interrogates the cultural and historical contingencies of childhood in an effort to expose, theorize, historicize, and explicate the spectacular queerness of early modern dramatic depictions of children.
Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance features essays questioning the extent to which education, an activity pursued in the home, classroom, and the church, led to, mirrored, and was perhaps even transformed by moments of instruction on stage. This volume argues that along with the popular press, the early modern stage is also a key pedagogical site and that education”performed and performative”plays a central role in gender construction. The wealth of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed and manuscript documents devoted to education (parenting guides, conduct books, domestic manuals, catechisms, diaries, and autobiographical writings) en...
The most studied of Thomas Heywood's plays, A Woman Killed With Kindness explores the boundaries of marital punishment and the moral weight of mercy. This major new edition of this startling domestic tragedy offers the standard, depth and range associated with all Arden editions. The on-page commentary notes explain the language, references and staging issues posed by the text while the lengthy, illustrated introduction offers a lively overview of the play's historical, performance and critical contexts. This is the ideal edition for study and performance.
Building on recent critical work, this volume offers a comprehensive consideration of the nature and forms of medieval and early modern childhoods, viewed through literary cultures. Its five groups of thematic essays range across a spectrum of disciplines, periods, and locations, from cultural anthropology and folklore to performance studies and the history of science, and from Anglo-Saxon burial sites to colonial America. Contributors include several renowned writers for children. The opening group of essays, Educating Children, explores what is perhaps the most powerful social engine for the shaping of a child. Performing Childhood addresses children at work and the role of play in the development of social imitation and learning. Literatures of Childhood examines texts written for children that reveal alternative conceptions of parent/child relations. In Legacies of Childhood, expressions of grief at the loss of a child offer a window into the family’s conceptions and values. Finally, Fictionalizing Literary Cultures for Children considers the real, material child versus the fantasy of the child as a subject.
Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama investigates the cultural work done by early modern theatrical performances of disability. Proffering an expansive view of early modern disability in performance, the contributors suggest methodologies for finding and interpreting it in unexpected contexts. The volume also includes essays on disabled actors whose performances are changing the meanings of disability in Shakespeare for present-day audiences. By combining these two areas of scholarship, this text makes a unique intervention in early modern studies and disability studies alike. Ultimately, the volume generates a conversation that locates and theorizes the staging of particular disabilities within their historical and literary contexts while considering continuity and change in the performance of disability between the early modern period and our own.
The first book to systematically analyze the role the performing arts played in English schools after the Reformation.
This collaborative, interdisciplinary study explores issues in theatrical and literary history that converge in two performances during the fabled Fêtes de Fontainebleau, produced for Catherine de Médicis by Pierre de Ronsard and other artists and courtiers. The authors also use their focus on the Queen's Day to consider a range of questions including the circumstances of the festival, its political program, and its relationship to court performance practices.
With its many rites of initiation (religious, educational, professional or sexual), Elizabethan and Jacobean education emphasized both imitation and discovery in a struggle to bring population to a minimal literacy, while more demanding techniques were being developed for the cultural elite. The Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern English Literature examines the question of transmission and of the educational procedures in16th- and 17th-century England by emphasizing deviant practices that questioned, reassessed or even challenged pre-established cultural norms and traditions. This volume thus alternates theoretical analyses with more specific readings in order to investigate the multip...
In the early-modern period, the English language was practically unknown outside of Britain and Ireland, so the English who wanted to travel and trade with the wider world had to become language-learners. John Gallagher explores who learned foreign languages in this period, how they did so, and what they did with the competence they acquired.