Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Renaissance

The introductory volume in the Reading and Studying Literature series, co-published with the Open University, is designed to introduce students to the Renaissance, and the Eighteenth Century. Each period is discussed in terms of an overarching theme, providing a clear focus for study and discussion and introducing readers to an important theoretical concept in literary studies.

The Renaissance is discussed in terms of themes of love and death in tragic drama, with particular reference to Shakepsare's Othello and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. The theme of...

First published in 1985, "The Subject of Tragedy" takes the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the starting point for an analysis of the differential identities of man and woman. Catherine Belsey charts, in a range of fictional and non-fictional texts, the production in the Renaissance of a meaning for subjectivity that is identifiably modern. The subject of liberal humanism self-determining, free origin of language, choice and action is highlighted as the product of a specific period in which man was the subject to which woman was related.

Beyond Melancholy explores the vital distinctions Renaissance writers made between grief, godly sorrow, despair, and melancholy, and the unique interactions these emotions were thought to produce in the mind, body, and soul. While most medical and philosophical writings emphasized...

Interest in creating emblematic devices, fashionable during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, did not disappear in England with the demise of the tournament and the Stuart masque. Alan R. Young examines the hundreds of emblematic devices used by the warring parties on their military flags during and immediatley after, the English Civil Wars. To be fully understood, these emblematic devices must be 'read' as part of the massive propaganda war waged by the different factions. This collection throws light on the nature of the conflicts that led to the civil wars, based on the...