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"From 1570 to 1630 prose fiction was an upstart in English culture, still defined in relation to poetry and drama yet invested with its own considerable power and potential. In these years, a community of writers arrived on the scene in London and strove to make a name for themselves largely from the prose that they produced at an astonishing rate. Modern scholars of the Renaissance have attempted to measure this prose against such standards as humanist culture or the emerging novel. But the prose fiction written by Lyly, Greene, and their imitators has eluded modern readers even more than the works of Shakespeare and Spenser. In Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction, Reid Barbour studies three in...
Reid Barbour brings the historical evidence of Browne's life together for the first time, allowing readers to contextualise his most celebrated works.
In this book, Reid Barbour offers the first full account of the lively but hazardous transmission of these Hellenistic philosophies over the first half-century of Stuart rule, including the cataclysmic years of civil war that forever changed the role of classical culture in English intellectual life.
Reid Barbour's 2002 study takes a fresh look at English Protestant culture in the reign of Charles I (1625–1649). In the decades leading into the civil war and the execution of their monarch, English writers explored the experience of a Protestant life of holiness, looking at it in terms of heroic endeavours, worship, the social order, and the cosmos. Barbour examines sermons and theological treatises to argue that Caroline religious culture comprises a rich and extensive stocktaking of the conditions in which Protestantism was celebrated, undercut, and experienced. Barbour argues that this stocktaking was also carried out in unusual and sometimes quite secular contexts; in the masques, plays and poetry of the era as well as in scientific works and diaries. This broad-ranging study offers an extensive appraisal of crucial seventeenth-century themes, and will be of interest to historians as well as literary scholars of the period.
This book explores how machinery and the practice of mechanics participate in the intellectual culture of Renaissance humanism. Before the emergence of the modern concept of technology, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writers recognized the applicability of mechanical practices and objects to some of their most urgent moral, aesthetic, and political questions. The construction, use, and representation of devices including clocks, scientific instruments, stage machinery, and war engines not only reflect but also actively reshape how Renaissance writers define and justify artifice and instrumentality - the reliance upon instruments, mechanical or otherwise, to achieve a particular end. Harnessing the discipline of mechanics to their literary and philosophical concerns, scholars and poets including Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, George Chapman, and Gabriel Harvey look to machinery to ponder and dispute all manner of instrumental means, from rhetoric and pedagogy to diplomacy and courtly dissimulation.
Focuses on the literary implications of 17th-century religion, Shakespeare's Roman plays, and 16th-century poetry.
Reid Barbour's study takes a fresh look at English Protestant culture in the reign of Charles I (1625 1649). In the decades leading into the civil war and the execution of their monarch, English writers explored the experience of a Protestant life of holiness, in terms of heroic endeavors, worship, the social order, and the cosmos. This broad ranging study offers an extensive reappraisal of crucial seventeenth-century themes, and will be of interest to historians as well as literary scholars of the period.
This book examines the philosophical and scientific achievements of Sir Kenelm Digby, a successful English diplomat, privateer and natural philosopher of the mid-1600s. Not widely remembered today, Digby is one of the most intriguing figures in the history of early modern philosophers. Among scholars, he is known for his attempt to reconcile what perhaps seem to be irreconcilable philosophical frameworks: Aristotelianism and early modern mechanism. This contributed volume offers the first full-length treatment of Digby’s work and of the unique position he occupied in early modern intellectual history. It explores key aspects of Digby’s metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical method,...
This is a pathbreaking book on how to talk about racism--not only Kant's racism but also racism more generally. It challenges the prevailing individualistic approach to Kant's racism and invites the reader to think about the issue in a more holistic, thoughtful, and transformative way. Using Kant as a case study, it shows that history is not just something to be read, but something we still live with, and that oftentimes we must see the past more clearly to bring about a better future.
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