Disputable Friends

ISBN-13: 9783639143645 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 236 str.

John McCullough

Opis

What does it mean to be a friend in ShakespearesEngland? In their writings on the subject,Renaissance users of rhetoric would recognize, deployand appreciate tropes and textual ambiguities in amanner alien to twenty-first century readers. Thelarge body of classical writings on friendship whichcropped up on early modern school curricula,especially Ciceros productively paradoxical DeAmicitia, provided imagery and scenarios which couldbe recast by fertile imaginations. This inventive use of tropes and contradictions whenwriting about friendship has important parallels forqueer scholars. The problems and benefits ofasserting a queer history are considered here, asis such a historys ambiguous relationship tohistoricist reading practices. Texts examined include three 1580s conduct books onfriendship; John Florios translation of Montaignesessay on friendship; later English essays onfriendship by Francis Bacon and his contemporaries;the correspondence between Edmund Spenser and GabrielHarvey; and Shakespeares Hamlet, King Henry IV andSonnets.

O autorze

John McCullough teaches English Literature and Creative Writing
at the University of Sussex and the Open University. He lives in
Brighton.