Writing Early Modern London: Memory, Text and Community

ISBN-13: 9781137294913 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 276 str.

Andrew Gordon

Opis

What does it mean to write the city? How could the myriad experiences of life in early modern London be translated into textual form? In a detailed study of works ranging from little known manuscript accounts to major canonical texts from the pen of Thomas Middleton and Isabella Whitney, Writing Early Modern London pursues these questions. Arguing that the impulse to record and reflect upon the early modern city was fuelled by the process of religious reformation, it traces the profound impact of these upheavals upon how community was experienced and imagined. The authors studied here show how rites of community were appropriated and re-imagined in texts which responded creatively to the transformation of urban life. Contesting London's future involved contesting the past, and Writing Early Modern London demonstrates how memory became a key cultural battleground, one in which writing itself was implicated, as a far-reaching 'reformation of the archive' challenged the habits of memory within early modern culture.

Recenzje

"...whereas such volumes often offer little more than a collection of essays on a narrow range of canonical or proto-canonical literary works, this book both promises and delivers a great deal more, and should be read by all historians of early modern London or urban culture between the Reformation and the Civil War... This is truly a model of new historicism in action." Jonathan Barry, Urban History

Spis treści

1. Introduction: Writing the City 2. Henry Machyn's Book of Remembrance 3. Contesting Inheritance: William Smith and Isabella Whitney 4. John Stow and the Textuality of Custom 5. Credit History to Civic History: Thomas Middleton and the Politics of Urban Memory 6. Conclusion

O autorze

Andrew Gordon is a Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of Aberdeen, UK. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters on early modern London, manuscript culture and correspondence. He has edited (with Bernhard Klein) Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (2001), and (with Thomas Rist) The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern Britain (2013).