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Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare's Theatre
This collection considers issues that have emerged in Early Modern Studies in the past fifteen years relating to understandings of mind and body in Shakespeare’s world. Informed by The Body in Parts, the essays in this book respond also to the notion of an early modern ‘body-mind’ in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries are understood in terms of bodily parts and cognitive processes. What might the impact of such understandings be on our picture of Shakespeare’s theatre or on our histories of the early modern period, broadly speaking? This book provides a wide range of approaches to this challenge, covering histories of cognition, studies of early modern stage practices, textual ...
Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater
This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays suc...
On Uneven Ground
The history of literary and artistic production in modern Japan has typically centered on the literature and art of Tokyo, yet cultural activity in the country's regional cities and rural towns was no less vibrant. On Uneven Ground recovers pieces of this neglected history through the figure of Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933). While alive, he remained a mostly unknown and unread provincial author whose experiments with narrative fiction, amateur theater, and farmer's art reveal an intense determination to reimagine and remake his native place, in the northeast of Japan, meaningful. Today, Miyazawa is one of the most recognized figures in Japan's modern literary canon. The story of his radical posthumous rise presents an opportunity to examine the larger history of how writing and other forms of artistic practice have intersected with place-based identity and the uneven geography of cultural production. The first book-length study of Miyazawa in English, On Uneven Ground centers on Miyazawa's life and writing to recreate a sense of what it was to write about and remake place from a spatially marginal position in the cultural field.
Blotted Lines
Blotted Lines rebuffs centuries of mythologization about the creative process—the idea that William Shakespeare "never blotted out line"—to argue that by studying how early modern writers faced the challenges of writing poetry, instructors today can empower their students' approaches to critical writing. Adhaar Noor Desai offers deeply researched accounts of how poetic labor intersected with early modern rhetorical theory, material culture, and social networks. Tracing the productive struggles of such writers as George Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, John Davies of Hereford, Lady Anne Southwell, and Shakespeare across their manuscripts, Desai identifies in their work instances of discompositio...
The Bond of Empathy in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
This study examines the various means of becoming empathetic and using this knowledge to explain the epistemic import of the characters’ interaction in the works written by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and their contemporaries. By attuning oneself to another’s expressive phenomena, the empathizer acquires an inter- and intrapersonal knowledge that exposes the limitations of hyperbole, custom, or unbridled passion to explain the profundity of their bond. Understanding the substantive meaning of the characters’ discourse and narrative context discloses their motivations and how they view themselves. The aim is to explore the place of empathy in select late medieval and early modern portrayals of the body and mind and explicate the role they play in forging an intimate rapport.
The Subtle Knot
In the early modern period, poetic form underpinned and influenced scientific progress. The language and imagery of seventeenth-century writers and natural philosophers reveal how the age-old struggle between body and soul led to the brain’s emergence as a curiosity in its own right. Investigating the intersection of the humanities and sciences in the works of authors ranging from William Shakespeare and John Donne to William Harvey, Margaret Cavendish, and Johann Remmelin, Lianne Habinek tells how early modernity came to view the brain not simply as grey matter but as a wealth of other wondrous possibilities – a book in which to read the soul’s writing, a black box to be violently unlocked, a womb to nourish intellectual conception, a creative engine, a subtle knot that traps the soul and thereby makes us human. For seventeenth-century thinkers, she argues, these comparisons were not simply casual metaphors but integral to early ideas about brain function. Demonstrating how the disparate fields of neuroscientific history and literary studies converged, The Subtle Knot tells the story of how the mind came to be identified with the brain.
Timothie Bright and the Origins of Early Modern Shorthand
In Timothie Bright and the Origins of Early Modern Shorthand, J.D. Fleming brings together two areas of sixteenth-century intellectual history. One is the period emergence of artificial systems for verbatim shorthand notation—a crucial episode in the history of information. The other is the ancient medical discourse of melancholy humour, or black bile. Timothie Bright (1550–1615), physician and priest, prompts the juxtaposition. For he was the author, not only of the period’s original shorthand manual—Characterie (1588)—but also of the first book in English on the dark humour: The Treatise of Melancholy (1586). Bright’s account of melancholy involves a cybernetic phenomenology of...
Out of Sync & Out of Work
Out of Sync & Out of Work explores the representation of obsolescence, particularly of labor, in film and literature during a historical moment in which automation has intensified in capitalist economies. Joel Burges analyzes texts such as The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Wreck-It Ralph, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Iron Council, and examines their “means” of production. Those means include a range of subjects and narrative techniques, including the “residual means” of including classic film stills in a text, the “obstinate means” of depicting machine breaking, the “dated means” of employing the largely defunct technique of stop-motion animation, and the “obsolete” means of celebrating a labor strike. In every case, the novels and films that Burges scrutinizes call on these means to activate the reader’s/viewer’s awareness of historical time. Out of Sync & Out of Work advances its readers’ grasp of the complexities of historical time in contemporary culture, moving the study of temporality forward in film and media studies, literary studies, critical theory, and cultural critique.
Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England
Examines the impact of hearing on the formal and generic development of early modern theatreEarly modern drama was in fundamental ways an aural art form. How plays should sound, and how they should be heard, were vital questions to the formal development of early modern drama. Ultimately, they shaped the two of its most popular genres: revenge tragedy and city comedy. Simply put, theatregoers were taught to hear these plays differently. Revenge tragedies by Shakespeare and Kyd imagine sound stabbing, piercing, and slicing into listeners' bodies on and off the stage; while comedies by Jonson and Marston imagine it being sampled selectively, according to taste. Listening for Theatrical Form in...
Formal matters
How do the formal properties of early modern texts, together with the materials that envelop and shape them, relate to the cultural, political, and social world of their production? Formal matters: Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature answers this question by linking formalist analysis with the insights of book history. It thus represents the new English Renaissance literary historiography tying literary composition to the materials and material practices of writing. The book combines studies of familiar and lesser known texts, from the poems and plays of Shakespeare to jests and printed commonplace books. Its ten studies make important, original contributions to research on the genres of early modern literature, focusing on the involvement of literary forms in the scribal and print cultures of compilation, continuation, translation, and correspondence, as well as in matters of political republicanism and popular piety, among others. Taken together, the collection’s essays exemplify how an attention to form and matter can historicise writing without abandoning a literary focus.
