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Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History
Marina Leslie draws on three important early modern utopian texts--Thomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, and Margaret Cavendish's Description of a New World Called the Blazing World--as a means of exploring models for historical transformation and of addressing the relationship of literature and history in contemporary critical practice. While the genre of utopian texts is a fertile terrain for historicist readings, Leslie demonstrates that utopia provides unstable ground for charting out the relation of literary text to historical context. In particular, she examines the ways that both Marxist and new historicist critics have taken the literary utopia not simply as one form am...
Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres
Continuum Contemporaries will be a wonderful source of ideas and inspiration for members of book clubs and readings groups, as well as for literature students.The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to 30 of the most popular, most acclaimed, and most influential novels of recent years. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question. The books in the series will all follow the same structure:a biography of the novelist, including other works, influences, and, in some cases, an interview; a full-length study of the novel, drawing out the most important themes and ideas; a summary of how the novel was received upon publication; a summary of how the novel has performed since publication, including film or TV adaptations, literary prizes, etc.; a wide range of suggestions for further reading, including websites and discussion forums; and a list of questions for reading groups to discuss.
Futurescapes
This book testifies to the growing interest in the many spaces of utopia. It intends to 'map out' on utopian and science-fiction discourses some of the new and revisionist models of spatial analysis applied in Literary and Cultural Studies in recent years. The aim of the volume is to side-step the established generic binary of utopia and dystopia or science fiction and thus to open the analysis of utopian literature to new lines of inquiry. The essays collected here propose to think of utopias not so much as fictional texts about future change and transformation but as vital elements in a cultural process through which social, spatial and subjective identities are formed. Utopias can thus be...
Receptions of Antiquity, Constructions of Gender in European Art, 1300-1600
Receptions of Antiquity, Constructions of Gender in European Art, 1300-1600 presents scholarship in classical reception at its nexus with art history and gender studies. It considers the ways that artists, patrons, collectors, and viewers in late medieval and early modern Europe used ancient Greek and Roman art, texts, myths, and history to interact with and shape notions of gender. The essays examine Giotto's Arena Chapel frescoes, Michelangelo's Medici Chapel personifications, Giulio Romano's decoration of the Palazzo del Te, and other famous and lesser-known sculptures, paintings, engravings, book illustrations, and domestic objects as well as displays of ancient art. Visual responses to antiquity in this era, the volume demonstrates, bore a complex and significant relationship to the construction of, and challenges to, contemporary gender norms.
The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon's Thought
"Presents close analysis of eight of Francis Bacon's texts in order to investigate the relation of his religious views to his instauration. Attempts to correct the persistent misconception of Bacon as a secular modern who dismissed religion in order to promote the human advancement of knowledge"--Provided by publisher.
Utopian Negotiation
Aphra Behn (1640–1689) and Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) were two of the boldest women authors of seventeenth century England. They made gestures toward a utopian future involving female emancipation and gender agreement, but depicted a world too complex for simple answers. In the first book-length exploration of the two authors together, Holmesland reevaluates the nature of utopianism in the writings of both, considering a wide range of their literary output. Both writers try to avoid fixed positions, exploring areas in between, seeking mediating solutions through "utopian negotiation." Requiring more equal gender relations, for instance, they challenge patriarchalism; however, while seeking to redefine the heroic code of honor, idealizing gentleness in men, they call for a femininity with heroic resources. Aspiring to such ideals of male-female mutuality, both authors extend this thinking to their view of the body politic.
Réécriture Des Mythes
Definir de facon univalente la notion de mythe et celle d'utopie semble en soi une entreprise tout a fait utopique. Par ailleurs, jumeler les deux notions, celle du mythe et celle d'utopie, releve d'un processus de reflexion qui peut facilement etre a double tranchant: le mythe, construction par excellende de l'imaginaire humain, ne se situe-t-il pas ailleurs que dans un non-lieu? et l'utopie, quant a elle, ne fait-elle pas echo au mythe, a la fois s'en inspirant, le niant et le transformant? Redondance possible, et aussi, parfois, refus des deux domaines a admettre leur interdependance, cheninement parallele surtout et creation commune de ce qui, en fin de compte, s'avere mythe transforme, utopie revistee. Toutefois, mythes et utopies quels que soient la position choisie, le point de vue defendu, semblent faire bon menage, a en juger par ce projet, mavec dix-neuf textes couvrant principalement la litterature contemporaine des femmes, mais puisant parfois aux uvres anterieures qui ont deja prepare le terrain, en offrant des visions d'existences idylliques ne serait-ce que litteraires."
Wonder and Science
During the early modern period, western Europe was transformed by the proliferation of new worlds—geographic worlds found in the voyages of discovery and conceptual and celestial worlds opened by natural philosophy, or science. The response to incredible overseas encounters and to the profound technological, religious, economic, and intellectual changes occurring in Europe was one of nearly overwhelming wonder, expressed in a rich variety of texts. In the need to manage this wonder, to harness this imaginative overabundance, Mary Baine Campbell finds both the sensational beauty of early scientific works and the beginnings of the divergence of the sciences—particularly geography, astronom...
Resurrecting Elizabeth I in Seventeenth-century England
Introduced by a brief examination of the anonymous seventeenth-century miniature painting used on the book's jacket and frontispiece, essays in Resurrecting Elizabeth I in Seventeenth-Century England combine literary and cultural analysis to show how and why images of Elizabeth Tudor appeared so widely in the century after her death and how those images were modified as the century progressed. The volume includes work by Steven W. May (on quotations and misquotations of Elizabeth's own words), Alan R. Young (on the Phoenix Queen and her successor, James I), Georgianna Ziegler (on Elizabeth's goddaughter, Elizabeth of Bohemia), Jonathan Baldo (on forgetting Elizabeth in Henry VIII), Lisa Gim (on Anna Maria van Schurman and Anne Bradstreet's visions of Elizabeth as an exemplary woman), and Kim H. Noling (on John Banks' creation of a maternal genealogy for English Protestantism).
Sociable Letters
The writings of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, are remarkable for their vivid depiction of the mores and mentality of seventeenth-century England. This edition includes all of Cavendish’s Sociable Letters (1664), a collection of writings that comments on a wide range of aspects of seventeenth-century society, such as war and peace, science and medicine, English and Classical literatures, and social issues such as choosing a spouse, married life, infidelity, divorce, and the option of women not to marry. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a valuable selection of primary documents that situate Margaret Cavendish and Sociable Letters within the context of English letter writing and other early women writers. Appendices include the letters Cavendish wrote during her courtship with William Cavendish; letters by two family members, Elizabeth Cavendish Egerton and Christiana Cavendish; letters written by Aphra Behn, Dorothy Osborne, and Angel Day; and an essay by Francis Bacon.
