'Household Business'

'Household Business'
Author: Viviana Comensoli
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1999-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442658010

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The domestic play flourished on the English popular stage during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Its roots were predominantly native, rather than classical, and its mainspring was the staging of domestic conflict amongst English characters from the middle ranks of society. 'Household Business' traces the genre's origins in the cycle plays of medieval England and examines its aesthetic configurations in relation to extra-literary discourses and practices that underwrote Renaissance ideologies of private life. At a time when the orthodox view of the family defined it as the foundation of the social order, a number of domestic dramas took a more critical perspective, stressing the contradictions and struggles that attend marriage and the patriarchal family. In addition to well-known domestic dramas as A Woman Killed with Kindness, Arden of Feversham, The Witch of Edmonton, and A Yorkshire Tragedy, Viviana Comensoli analyzes less well-studied plays as A Warning for Fair Women, Two Lamentable Tragedies, and The Late Lancashire Witches. The book also provides an extensive and timely assessment of domestic comedy, demonstrating how plays such as The London Prodigal, The Fair Maid of Bristow, and The Honest Whore (Parts I and II) resist homiletic paradigms in favour of a more dialectical dramaturgy.

The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650

The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650
Author: Julie Sanders
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2011-05-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139497340

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Literary geographies is an exciting new area of interdisciplinary research. Innovative and engaging, this book applies theories of landscape, space and place from the discipline of cultural geography within an early modern historical context. Different kinds of drama and performance are analysed: from commercial drama by key playwrights to household masques and entertainment performed by families and in semi-official contexts. Sanders provides a fresh look at works from the careers of Ben Jonson, John Milton and Richard Brome, paying attention to geographical spaces and habitats like forests, coastlines and arctic landscapes of ice and snow, as well as the more familiar locales of early modern country estates and city streets and spaces. Overall, the book encourages readers to think about geography as kinetic, embodied and physical, not least in its literary configurations, presenting a key contribution to early modern scholarship.

Literature and Medievalism in Early Modern England

Literature and Medievalism in Early Modern England
Author: Mike Rodman Jones
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2024-11-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1843846594

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Directs scholarly focus towards a deeper appreciation of medievalist trends in the Elizabethan literary landscape and challenges traditional narratives of 'modernity'. Themes and motifs from the Middle Ages are found across the drama, poetry, prose fiction, polemic, and satire of the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, but their impact and influence on this literary landscape have rarely been considered. This study offers a nuanced examination of this intricate interplay between pre-Reformation culture and its post-Reformation reception in England. Each chapter explores a particular genre or aspect of medievalism at play in this writing: civic medievalism; literary adaptation and satire in ecclesiastical polemic; multiple uses of temporality in post-Marprelatian prose fiction; the poetics of memorialisation and voice in medievalist complaint poetry; and the construction of Reformation history and confessional difference on the stage in the early Jacobean period. Moving beyond canonical writers such as Shakespeare and Spenser, the book deals in detail with the drama of Thomas Heywood and Thomas Dekker (alongside unattributed plays); the prose fiction of Robert Greene, Thomas Deloney, Henry Chettle and anonymous others; the historical verse of Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton, and the polemical writing of Samuel Harsnett, Job Throckmorton and Matthew Sutcliffe. Through a meticulous analysis of these writers and their works, it shows how medieval texts were creatively deployed and adapted in new literary forms, fashioning the emergence of early forms of medievalism, and challenging conventional notions of temporal and cultural divides.

Annotated Chaucer bibliography

Annotated Chaucer bibliography
Author: Mark Allen
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 886
Release: 2015-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1784996459

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An extremely thorough, expertly compiled and crisply annotated comprehensive bibliography of Chaucer scholarship between 1997 and 2010

A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume III

A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume III
Author: Richard Dutton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 047099729X

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This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism. Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Examines each of Shakespeare’s plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis. Volumes are organized in relation to generic categories: namely the histories, the tragedies, the romantic comedies, and the late plays, problem plays and poems. Each volume contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category, as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre. Offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twenty-first century. This companion to Shakespeare’s comedies contains original essays on every comedy from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Twelfth Night as well as twelve additional articles on such topics as the humoral body in Shakespearean comedy, Shakespeare’s comedies on film, Shakespeare’s relation to other comic writers of his time, Shakespeare’s cross-dressing comedies, and the geographies of Shakespearean comedy.

Renaissance Drama 33

Renaissance Drama 33
Author: Patricia Parker
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2005-07-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0810121999

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Renaissance Drama, an annual and interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore traditional canons of drama, the significance of performance (broadly construed) to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theatre, and performance.

Flaunting

Flaunting
Author: Amanda Bailey
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 080209242X

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In the early modern period, the theatrical stage offered one of the most popular forms of entertainment and aesthetic pleasure. It also fulfilled an important cultural function by displaying modes of behaviour and dramatizing social interaction within a community. Flaunting argues that the theatre in late sixteenth-century England created the conditions for a subculture of style whose members came to distinguish themselves by their sartorial extravagance and social impudence. Drawing on evidence from legal documents, economic treatises, domestic manuals, accounts of playhouse practices, and stage plays, Amanda Bailey critiques standard accounts maintaining that those who flaunted their apparel were simply aspirants, or gaudy versions of the superiors they sought to emulate. Instead, she suggests that what mattered most was not what these young men wore but how they wore their clothes. These young men shared a distinctive sartorial sensibility and used that sensibility to undermine authority at all levels of society. Flaunting therefore, examines male style as a visual form of subversion against the norms of Renaissance England with the stage as the primary source of inspiration for collective identification. A glimpse into both the celebration of and opposition to social irreverence in the early modern period, Flaunting is a fascinating historical account of drama, fashion, and rebellion with surprisingly close parallels to the contemporary world.