Renaissance Suppliants

2016-06-02 Literary Criticism

Author : Leah Whittington
Release : 2016-06-02
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 40X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Renaissance Suppliants by : Leah Whittington

Download or read book Renaissance Suppliants written by Leah Whittington. This book was released on 2016-06-02. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renaissance Suppliants studies supplication as a social and literary event in the long European Renaissance. It argues that scenes of supplication are defining episodes in a literary tradition stretching back to Greco-Roman antiquity, taking us to the heart of fundamental questions of politics and religion, ethics and identity, sexuality and family. As a perennial mode of asymmetrical communication in moments of helplessness and extreme need, supplication speaks to ways that people live together despite grave inequalities. It is a strategy that societies use to regulate and perpetuate themselves, to negotiate conflict, and to manage situations in which relationships threaten to unravel. All the writers discussed here—Vergil, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Milton—find supplication indispensable for thinking about problems of antagonism, difference, and hierarchy, bringing the aesthetic resources of supplicatory interactions to bear on their unique literary and cultural circumstances. The opening chapters establish a conceptual framework for thinking about supplication as facilitating transitions between states of feeling and positions of relative status, beginning with Homer and classical literature. Vergil's Aeneid is paradigmatic instance in which literary and social structures of the ancient past are transformed to suit the needs of the present, and supplication becomes a figure for the act of cultural translation. Subsequent chapters take up different aspects of Renaissance supplicatory discourse, showing how postures of humiliation and abjection are appropriated and transformed in erotic poetry, drama, and epic. The book ends with Milton who invests gestures of self-abasement with unexpected dignity.

A Literary History of Reconciliation

2018-09-06 Literary Criticism

Author : Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen
Release : 2018-09-06
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 243/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis A Literary History of Reconciliation by : Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen

Download or read book A Literary History of Reconciliation written by Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen. This book was released on 2018-09-06. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From William Shakespeare to Marilynne Robinson, this book examines representations of interpersonal reconciliation in works of literature, focusing on how these representations draw on the language of divine forgiveness. Christian theology sees divine forgiveness as conditional upon a sinner's remorse and self-abasement before God, but also as a form of grace – unconditional and rooted only in divine love. Van Dijkhuizen explores what happens when this paradoxical forgiveness paradigm comes to serve as a template for interpersonal reconciliation. As A Literary History of Reconciliation shows, literary writers imagine interpersonal reconciliation as being centrally about power and hierarchy, and present forgiveness without power as longed for but ever elusive. Drawing on major works of literature from the early modern era to the present day, this book explores works by John Milton, Virginia Woolf, J.M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan and others to craft a literary history that will appeal to readers interested in literature, religion and philosophy.

Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study

2018-03-28 Literary Criticism

Author : Dennis Austin Britton
Release : 2018-03-28
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 885/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study by : Dennis Austin Britton

Download or read book Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study written by Dennis Austin Britton. This book was released on 2018-03-28. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book asks new questions about how and why Shakespeare engages with source material, and about what should be counted as sources in Shakespeare studies. The essays demonstrate that source study remains an indispensable mode of inquiry for understanding Shakespeare, his authorship and audiences, and early modern gender, racial, and class relations, as well as for considering how new technologies have and will continue to redefine our understanding of the materials Shakespeare used to compose his plays. Although source study has been used in the past to construct a conservative view of Shakespeare and his genius, the volume argues that a rethought Shakespearean source study provides opportunities to examine models and practices of cultural exchange and memory, and to value specific cultures and difference. Informed by contemporary approaches to literature and culture, the essays revise conceptions of sources and intertextuality to include terms like "haunting," "sustainability," "microscopic sources," "contamination," "fragmentary circulation" and "cultural conservation." They maintain an awareness of the heterogeneity of cultures along lines of class, religious affiliation, and race, seeking to enhance the opportunity to register diverse ideas and frameworks imported from foreign material and distant sources. The volume not only examines print culture, but also material culture, theatrical paradigms, generic assumptions, and oral narratives. It considers how digital technologies alter how we find sources and see connections among texts. This book asserts that how critics assess and acknowledge Shakespeare’s sources remains interpretively and politically significant; source study and its legacy continues to shape the image of Shakespeare and his authorship. The collection will be valuable to those interested in the relationships between Shakespeare’s work and other texts, those seeking to understand how the legacy of source study has shaped Shakespeare as a cultural phenomenon, and those studying source study, early modern authorship, implications of digital tools in early modern studies, and early modern literary culture.

Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition

2021-03-09 Literary Criticism

Author : Tania Demetriou
Release : 2021-03-09
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 25X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition by : Tania Demetriou

Download or read book Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition written by Tania Demetriou. This book was released on 2021-03-09. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers the first in-depth investigation of Thomas Heywood’s engagement with the classics. Its introduction and twelve essays trace how the classics shaped Heywood’s work in a variety of genres across a writing career of over forty years, ranging from drama, epic and epyllion, to translations, compendia and the design of a warship for Charles I. Close readings demonstrate the influence of a capaciously conceived classical tradition that included continental editions and translations of Latin and Greek texts, early modern mythographies and the medieval tradition of Troy. They attend to Heywood’s thought-provoking imitations and juxtapositions of these sources, his use of myth to interrogate gender and heroism, and his turn to antiquity to celebrate and defamiliarise the theatrical or political present. Heywood’s better-known works are discussed alongside critically neglected ones, making the collection valuable for undergraduates and researchers alike.

The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature

2017-03-31 Literary Criticism

Author : Sean Keilen
Release : 2017-03-31
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 682/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature by : Sean Keilen

Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature written by Sean Keilen. This book was released on 2017-03-31. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging and ambitiously conceived Research Companion, contributors explore Shakespeare’s relationship to the classic in two broad senses. The essays analyze Shakespeare’s specific debts to classical works and weigh his classicism’s likeness and unlikeness to that of others in his time; they also evaluate the effects of that classical influence to assess the extent to which it is connected with whatever qualities still make Shakespeare, himself, a classic (arguably the classic) of modern world literature and drama. The first sense of the classic which the volume addresses is the classical culture of Latin and Greek reading, translation, and imitation. Education in the canon of pagan classics bound Shakespeare together with other writers in what was the dominant tradition of English and European poetry and drama, up through the nineteenth and even well into the twentieth century. Second—and no less central—is the idea of classics as such, that of books whose perceived value, exceeding that of most in their era, justifies their protection against historical and cultural change. The volume’s organizing insight is that as Shakespeare was made a classic in this second, antiquarian sense, his work’s reception has more and more come to resemble that of classics in the first sense—of ancient texts subject to labored critical study by masses of professional interpreters who are needed to mediate their meaning, simply because of the texts’ growing remoteness from ordinary life, language, and consciousness. The volume presents overviews and argumentative essays about the presence of Latin and Greek literature in Shakespeare’s writing. They coexist in the volume with thought pieces on the uses of the classical as a historical and pedagogical category, and with practical essays on the place of ancient classics in today’s Shakespearean classrooms.

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Renaissance Suppliants

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