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Totaro elucidates the interdisciplinary nature of plague writing, which raises religious, medical, civic, social, and individual concerns in early modern England. Each of the primary texts in the collection offers a glimpse into a particular subgenre of plague writing, beginning with Thomas Moulton’s plague remedy and prayers published by the Church of England and devoted to the issue of the plague. William Bullein’s A Dialogue, both pleasant and pietyful, a work that both addresses concerns related to the plague and offers humorous literary entertainment, exemplifies the multilayered nature of plague literature. The plague orders of Queen Elizabeth I highlight the community-wide attempts to combat the plague and deal with its manifold dilemmas. 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Through close readings of canonical and obscure texts, Wilburn explores how various authors rebelled against such assessments of black intellect by altering Milton’s meanings, themes, and figures beyond orthodox interpretations and imbuing them with hermeneutic shades of interpretive and cultural difference. However they remastered Milton, these artists respected his oeuvre as a sacred yet secular talking book of revolt, freedom, and cultural liberation.  Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt particularly draws upon recent satanic criticism in Milton studies, placing it in dialogue with methodologies germane to African American literary studies. 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As a result, Shakespearean scenes that have long been identified as important and influential by scholars can now be considered in terms of another revealing cultural marker—that of culinary dynamics.  Renaissance scholars, as David Goldstein and Amy Tigner point out, have only begun to grapple with the importance of cuisine in literature. An earlier generation of criticism concerned itself principally with cataloguing the foodstuffs in the plays. Recent analyses have operated largely within debates about humoralism and dietary literature, consumption, and interiority, working to historicize food in relation to the early modern body. The essays in Culinary Shakespeare build upon that prior focus on individual bodily experience but also transcend it, emphasizing the aesthetic, communal, and philosophical aspects of food, while also presenting valuable theoretical background. As various essays demonstrate, many of the central issues in Shakespeare studies can be elucidated by turning our attention to the study of food and drink. The societal and religious associations of drink, for example, or the economic implications of ingredients gathered from other lands, have meaningful implications for our understanding of both early modern and contemporary periods—including aspects of community, politics, local and global food production, biopower and the state, addiction, performativity, posthumanism, and the relationship between art and food. 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Private Lives Made Public: The Invention of Biography in Early Modern England contributes an incisive, fresh take on life-writing—a catch-all label that, in contemporary discourse, encompasses biography, autobiography, memoirs, letters, diaries, journals, and even blogs and examines why the writing of life stories appeared somehow newly necessary and newly challenging for political discourse in the late seventeenth century. Walkden engages readers in a compelling discussion of what she terms biographical populism, arguing that the biographies of this period sought to replace political argument with life stories, thus conducting politics by another means. The modern biography, then, emerges after 1649 as a cultural weapon designed to reorient political discourse away from the analysis of public institutions and practices toward a less threatening, but similarly meaningful, conversation about the unfolding of an individual’s life in the realm of private experience.  Unlike other recent studies, Walkden moves toward a consideration of widely consumed works—the Eikon Basilike, Izaak Walton’s Lives, John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, and Daniel Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier—and gives particular attention to their complex engagement with that political and literary moment.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53181252534545,"sku":"NLS9780271092973","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780271092973.jpg?v=1772237286"},{"product_id":"forgiving-the-gift-book-sean-lawrence-9780271092966","title":"Forgiving the Gift","description":"Forgiving the Gift challenges the tendency to reflexively understand gifts as exchanges, negotiations, and circulations. Lawrence reads plays by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare as informed by an early modern belief in the possibility and even necessity of radical generosity, of gifts that break the cycle of economy and self-interest.  The prologue reads Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus to show how the play aligns gift and grace, depicting Faustus’s famous bond as the instrument simultaneously of reciprocal exchange and of damnation. In the introduction, the author frames his argument theoretically by placing Marcel Mauss’s classic essay, “The Gift,” into dialogue with Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricoeur to sketch two very different understandings of gift-giving. In the first, described by Mauss, the gift becomes a covert form of exchange. Though Mauss contrasts the gift economy with the market economy, his description of the gift economy nevertheless undermines his own project of discovering in it a basis for social solidarity. In the second understanding of gift exchange, derived from the philosophy of Levinas, the gift expresses the radical asymmetry of ethical concern.  Literature and philosophy scholars alike will benefit from the original readings of The Merchant of Venice, Edward II, King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and The Tempest, which constitute the body of the text. These readings find in the plays a generosity that exceeds the social practice of gift-giving, because extraordinarily generous acts of friendship or filial affection survive the collapse of social norms. Antonio in Merchant and the title character in Edward II practice a friendship whose extravagance marks its excess. Lear, on the other hand, brings about his tragedy by attempting to reduce filial love to debt. Titus also discovers a love excessive to social convention when rape and mutilation annihilate his daughter’s cultural value. Finally, Prospero in The Tempest sacrifices power and even his own life for the love of his daughter, giving a gift rendered asymmetrical by both its excess and its secrecy.  While proposing new readings of works of Renaissance drama, Forgiving the Gift also questions the model of human life from which many contemporary readings, especially those characterized as new historicist or cultural materialist, grow. In so doing, it addresses questions of how we are to understand literary texts—and how we are to live with others in the world.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53181253320977,"sku":"NLS9780271092966","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780271092966.jpg?v=1772237301"},{"product_id":"private-lives-made-public-book-andrea-walkden-9780820704821","title":"Private Lives Made Public","description":"\u003cp\u003eFollowing the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, the seventeenth century witnessed an explosion of print culture in England, including an unprecedented boom in biographical writing. Andrea Walkden offers a case-study examination of this fascinating trend, bringing together texts that generations of scholars have considered piecemeal and primarily as sources for their own research.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003ePrivate Lives Made Public: The Invention of Biography in Early Modern England\u003c\/i\u003e contributes an incisive, fresh take on life-writing--a catch-all label that, in contemporary discourse, encompasses biography, autobiography, memoirs, letters, diaries, journals, and even blogs and examines why the writing of life stories appeared somehow newly necessary and newly challenging for political discourse in the late seventeenth century. Walkden engages readers in a compelling discussion of what she terms biographical populism, arguing that the biographies of this period sought to replace political argument with life stories, thus conducting politics by another means. The modern biography, then, emerges after 1649 as a cultural weapon designed to reorient political discourse away from the analysis of public institutions and practices toward a less threatening, but similarly meaningful, conversation about the unfolding of an individual's life in the realm of private experience.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eUnlike other recent studies, Walkden moves toward a consideration of widely consumed works--the \u003ci\u003eEikon Basilike\u003c\/i\u003e, Izaak Walton's \u003ci\u003eLives\u003c\/i\u003e, John Aubrey's \u003ci\u003eBrief Lives\u003c\/i\u003e, and Daniel Defoe's \u003ci\u003eMemoirs of a Cavalier\u003c\/i\u003e--and gives particular attention to their complex engagement with that political and literary moment.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53181260038417,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53181260267793,"sku":"NLS9780820704821","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780820704821.jpg?v=1772237908"},{"product_id":"forgiving-the-gift-book-sean-lawrence-9780820704487","title":"Forgiving the Gift","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eForgiving the Gift\u003c\/i\u003e challenges the tendency to reflexively understand gifts as exchanges, negotiations, and circulations. Lawrence reads plays by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare as informed by an early modern belief in the possibility and even necessity of radical generosity, of gifts that break the cycle of economy and self-interest.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe prologue reads Marlowe's \u003ci\u003eDr. Faustus\u003c\/i\u003e to show how the play aligns gift and grace, depicting Faustus's famous bond as the instrument simultaneously of reciprocal exchange and of damnation. In the introduction, the author frames his argument theoretically by placing Marcel Mauss's classic essay, \"The Gift,\" into dialogue with Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricoeur to sketch two very different understandings of gift-giving. In the first, described by Mauss, the gift becomes a covert form of exchange. Though Mauss contrasts the gift economy with the market economy, his description of the gift economy nevertheless undermines his own project of discovering in it a basis for social solidarity. In the second understanding of gift exchange, derived from the philosophy of Levinas, the gift expresses the radical asymmetry of ethical concern.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eLiterature and philosophy scholars alike will benefit from the original readings of \u003ci\u003eThe Merchant of Venice\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eEdward II\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eKing Lear\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eTitus Andronicus\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Tempest\u003c\/i\u003e, which constitute the body of the text. These readings find in the plays a generosity that exceeds the social practice of gift-giving, because extraordinarily generous acts of friendship or filial affection survive the collapse of social norms. Antonio in \u003ci\u003eMerchant\u003c\/i\u003e and the title character in \u003ci\u003eEdward II\u003c\/i\u003e practice a friendship whose extravagance marks its excess. Lear, on the other hand, brings about his tragedy by attempting to reduce filial love to debt. Titus also discovers a love excessive to social convention when rape and mutilation annihilate his daughter's cultural value. Finally, Prospero in \u003ci\u003eThe Tempest\u003c\/i\u003e sacrifices power and even his own life for the love of his daughter, giving a gift rendered asymmetrical by both its excess and its secrecy.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWhile proposing new readings of works of Renaissance drama, \u003ci\u003eForgiving the Gift\u003c\/i\u003e also questions the model of human life from which many contemporary readings, especially those characterized as new historicist or cultural materialist, grow. 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It is also the first study of a major interpoetic relationship that is responsive to the historicist critical enterprise, which has been dominant within literary study for the past 30 years, and engages the work of theorists of canon formation such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith and John Guillory. Most studies of the relation between one poet and another are wholly diachronic, examining the way in which brief, verbal recollections of the earlier poet--allusions--enhance or qualify the significance of passages in the later, alluding poet's work. But this study goes beyond that, considering its focal poets within a synchronic framework that allows us to respond to the Homer of mid-seventeenth century England specifically rather than to some transhistorically unvarying Homer, thus revealing that Homer is important not only to the significance but also to the canonical status of \u003ci\u003eParadise Lost\u003c\/i\u003e. 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Milton's approach to (and success at) securing canonical status for \u003ci\u003eParadise Lost\u003c\/i\u003e provides important insights not only into his own artistry, but into the dynamics of literary canon formation in general. \u003ci\u003eMilton and Homer\u003c\/i\u003e will appeal to Miltonists, classicists, scholars of early modern literature, and those interested in the debate over the formation of the literary canon.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53181260169489,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53181260333329,"sku":"NLS9780820704470","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780820704470.jpg?v=1772237889"},{"product_id":"renaissance-texts-medieval-subjectivities-book-danila-sokolov-9780820704975","title":"Renaissance Texts, Medieval Subjectivities","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn a major contribution to the burgeoning area of study that crosses between early modern texts and premodern cultures, Danila Sokolov argues for the necessity of reading the work of English Petrarchan writers in light of earlier medieval forms of poetic subjectivity. By doing just that, this book directly challenges one of the most enduring myths of contemporary criticism and shows that the many innovations associated with the poetry of Petrarchism derive from medieval subjectivities that continue to inform modern ideas of selfhood and modernity more generally.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWhile the lines of division between the Renaissance sonnet and earlier poetry are some of the most entrenched in early modern scholarship, even the origin point of that discourse--responses to Petrarch's \u003ci\u003eCanzoniere\u003c\/i\u003e--requires that we recognize that studies of medieval writing provide a necessary grounding. As Sokolov demonstrates through a series of careful readings of works by Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, and Shakespeare, this poetry is genealogically linked to earlier forms of discourse. In each of the instances discussed, the canonical Renaissance texts display their dependence on medieval technologies of selfhood, including those found in Langland's \u003ci\u003ePiers Plowman\u003c\/i\u003e, Chaucer's \u003ci\u003eBook of the Duchess\u003c\/i\u003e, Lydgate's \u003ci\u003eTemple of Glas\u003c\/i\u003e, and Henryson's \u003ci\u003eThe Testament of Creseyde\u003c\/i\u003e, among others.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eRenaissance Texts, Medieval Subjectivities\u003c\/i\u003e is not an attempt to identify acts of direct borrowing and imitation; instead, Sokolov focuses on continuities within structures of the poetic imagination: patterns of figuration, forms of textual selfhood, and discursive assemblages. Thus, the book opens up a field of productive engagement between the two periods without the constraints of material history, and also introduces scholars of Renaissance literature to medieval texts that often escape their attention but which have the potential to illuminate important aspects of early modern poetry, culture, and the history of subjectivity. Sokolov draws as well on a great deal of relevant historical evidence, focusing on Protestant attitudes to labor, theories of melancholy, Elizabethan poetics of marriage, legal history, and the impact of syphilis. With this multifaceted, groundbreaking approach to what is first and foremost a study of poetry and forms of the poetic imagination, Sokolov demonstrates that Renaissance selfhood is medieval in its essence, its constitution can be traced historically and textually, and the Renaissance's most well-known poetry still deserves fresh attention.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53230151401745,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53230151794961,"sku":"GOR014817837","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780820704975.jpg?v=1773084966"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/de-ch\/collections\/medieval-and-renaissance-literary-studies-buchreihe.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}