Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater

ISBN-13: 9781138020504 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 260 str.

Ronda Arab; Michelle Dowd; Adam Zucker

Opis

This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays such as Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday together with understudied texts such as court entertainments, and examining topics ranging from dramatic celebrity to women's political agency to the parental emotion of grief, this volume provides a fresh and at times provocative assessment of the "historical affects"-financial, emotional, and socio-political-that transformed Renaissance theater. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive theoretical or philosophical contexts, the essays in this volume ask readers to consider how drama emplaces the most personal, unspeakable passions in matrices defined in part by financial exchange, by erotic desire, by gender, by the material body, and by theatricality itself. As it encourages this conversation to take place, the collection provides scholars and students alike with a series of new perspectives, not only on the plays, emotions, and histories discussed in its pages, but also on broader shifts and pressures animating literary studies today.

Spis treści

Introduction Ronda Arab, Michelle M. Dowd, and Adam Zucker  Part I: Struggling with the Stage  1. Going Through the Motions: Affects, Machines, and John Ford’s The Broken Heart Patricia Cahill  2. Magnetic Theaters Benedict Robinson  3. Feeling Unhistorical Ellen MacKay  4. Literary Celebrity and Theatrical Culture in Shirley’s Bird in a Cage Allison K. Deutermann  Part II: Engendering…  5. Monstrous Teardrops: The Materiality of Early Modern Affection Ian Frederick Moulton  6. "Displeas’d ambitious TONGUE": Lingua and Lingual Duality Lianne Habinek  7. "Come, Eros, Eros!": Re-reading Emotion and Affect in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra Jyostna Singh  Part III: …A Nation  8. Wondering in Henry VIII or All is True Tiffany Werth  9. Angelica and Franceschina: The Italianate Characters of Juliet’s Nurse Bianca Finzi-Contini Calabresi  10. The Mirror and the Cage: Queens and Dwarfs at the Early Modern Court Pamela Allen Brown  11. Gold Digger or Golden Girl?: Purifying the Pursuit of Gold in Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, Part I Jane Hwang Degenhardt  Part IV: Theater of a City  12. Civic Affect and Female Political Agency in Sir Thomas More Mario DiGangi  13. Corporate Life in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday Henry S. Turner  14. Transforming the Younger Son: The Disruptive Affect of the Gentleman-Apprentice in Eastward Ho Ronda Arab  15. Managing Fear: The Commerce in Blackness and the London Lord Mayors’ Shows Ian Smith  Afterward Phyllis Rackin

O autorze

Ronda Arab, Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, is the author of Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage (2011), an examination of the gender status of working men in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Michelle M. Dowd is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is the author of Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2009) and The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage (forthcoming 2015).

Adam Zucker is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy and the co-editor of Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625-1642.