Subject And Object In Modern English

Author : Pamela S. Hammons
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN 13 : 9780754668992
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (689 download)

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Download or read book Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse written by Pamela S. Hammons and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "...an exceptionally strong study of seventeenth-century British poetry and its important---even crucial---relationship to a still larger, richer discourse of subjects and objects, gifts and debts, owners and renters, sovereigns and petitioners, which informed the early modern worlds of economies and politics, organized an emerging print culture, and shaped many ideas about sexuality and gender."---Elizabeth Mazzola, The City College of New York, author of Women's Wealth and Women's Writing in Early Modern England An important contribution to recent critical discussions about gender, sexuality, and material culture in Renaissance England. this study analyzes female and male-authored lyrics to illuminate how gender and sexuality inflected sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets' conceptualization of relations among people and things, human and non-human subjects and objects. Pamela S. Hammons examines lyrics from both manuscript and print collections including the verse of authors ranging from Robert Herrick, John Donne, and Ben Jonson to Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, and Acmilia Lanyer---and situates them in relation to legal theories, autobiographies, biographies, plays, and epics. Her approach fills a crucial gap in the conversation, which has focused upon drama and male-authored works, by foregrounding the significance of the lyric and women's writing. Hammons exposes the poetic strategies sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English women used to assert themselves as subjects of property and economic agents---in relation to material items ranging from personal property to real estate---despite the dominant patriarchal ideology insisting they were ideally temporary, passive vehicles for men's wealth. The study details how women imagined their multiple, complex interactions with the material world: the author shows that how a woman poet represents herself in relation to material objects is a flexible fiction she can mobilize for diverse purposes. Because this book analyzes men's and women's poems together, it isolates important gendered differences in how the poets envision human subjects' use, control, possession, and ownership of things and the influences, effects, and power of things over humans. It also adds to the increasing evidence for the pervasiveness of patriarchal anxieties associated with female economic agency in a culture in which women were often treated as objects. The eighteenth-century practitioners of anatomy saw their own period as `the perfection of anatomy'. This book looks at the investigation of anatomy in the `long' eighteenth century in disciplinary terms. This means looking in a novel way not only at the practical aspects of anatomizing but also at questions of how one became an anatomist, where and how the discipline was practised, what the point was of its practice, what counted as sub-disciplines of anatomy, and the nature of arguments over anatomical facts and priority of discovery. In particular pathology, generation and birth, and comparative anatomy are shown to have been linked together as sub-disciplines of anatomy. At first sight anatomy seems the most long-lived and stable of medical disciplines, from Galen and Vesalius to the present. But Cunningham argues that anatomy was, like so many other areas of knowledge, changed irrevocably around the end of the eighteenth century, with the creation of new disciplines, new forms of knowledge and new ways of investigation. The `long' eighteenth century, therefore, was not only the highpoint of anatomy but also the endpoint of old anatomy.