Word as Bond in English Literature from the Middle Ages to the Restoration

Download Word as Bond in English Literature from the Middle Ages to the Restoration PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 1512801259
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (128 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Word as Bond in English Literature from the Middle Ages to the Restoration by : J. Douglas Canfield

Download or read book Word as Bond in English Literature from the Middle Ages to the Restoration written by J. Douglas Canfield and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, the transmission of power in feudal European society depended on a code of fidelity, of political allegiance, and truth to one's word. The word as bond extended to include not only the pledge of allegiance between subject and king, but the troth-plight between lovers, the vow of friendship, and the judicial oath. Society was ultimately based upon a gentleman's or gentlewoman's word that was itself underwritten by the Word of God. J. Douglas Canfield argues that English literature of the feudal epoch placed this master trope of word as bond at the center of conflict. The trope does not passively reflect social reality; rather, it helps to define, to constitute the society and its values. Both society and literature were preoccupied by the contest between fidelity on the one hand and its antithesis, betrayal (with the political and sexual anarchy that it threatened) on the other. In literature, the conflict was usually resolved through supernatural aid, the intervention of the Logos, which guaranteed the validity of the word. Canfield analyzes over 25 representative works, focusing on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dryden, in the five dominant modes of aristocratic literature-romance, comedy, lyric, tragedy, and satire. In each chapter, he offers three examples, one from the Middle Ages, one from the Renaissance, and one from the Restoration. Canfield's study proceeds synchronically, attempting to show that the trope is always under stress. The language of heroic romance coexists with the language of subversive comedy and absurdist satire. In an Afterword, he suggests why the trope disappears—not from the discourse, where it remains to this day, but from the center of conflict in English literature after 1688.

Tricksters and Estates

Download Tricksters and Estates PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813189659
Total Pages : 429 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (131 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Tricksters and Estates by : J. Douglas Canfield

Download or read book Tricksters and Estates written by J. Douglas Canfield and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If the Renaissance was the Golden Age of English comedy, the Restoration was the Silver. These comedies are full of tricksters attempting to gain estates, the emblem and the reality of power in late feudal England. The tricksters appear in a number of guises, such as heroines landing their men, younger brothers seeking estates, or Cavaliers threatened with dispossession. The hybrid nature of these plays has long posed problems for critics, and few studies have attempted to deal with their diversity in a comprehensive way. Now one of the leading scholars of Restoration drama offers a cultural history of the period's comedy that puts the plays in perspective and reveals the ideological function they performed in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century. To explain this function, J. Douglas Canfield groups the plays into three categories: social comedy, which underwrites Stuart ideology; subversive comedy, which undercuts it; and comical satire, which challenges it as fundamentally immoral or amoral. Through play-by-play analysis, he demonstrates how most of the comedies support the ideology of the Stuart monarchs and the aristocracy, upholding what they regarded as their natural right to rule because of an innate superiority over all other classes. A significant minority of comedies, however, reveal cracks in class solidarity, portray witty heroines who inhabit the margins of society, or give voice to folk tricksters who embody a democratic force nearly capable of overwhelming class hierarchy. A smaller yet but still significant minority end in no resolution, no restoration, but, at their most radical, playfully portray Stuart ideology as empty rhetoric. Tricksters and Estates is a truly comprehensive work, offering serious critical readings of many plays that have never before received close attention and fresh insights into more familiar works. By juxtaposing the comedies of such lesser-known playwrights as Orrery, Lacy, and Rawlins with those of more familiar figures like Behn, Wycherley, and Dryden, the author invites a greater appreciation than has previously been possible of the meaning and function of Restoration comedy. This intelligent and wide-ranging study promises is a standard work in its field.

Cutting Edges

Download Cutting Edges PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN 13 : 9780870498923
Total Pages : 468 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (989 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Cutting Edges by : James E. Gill

Download or read book Cutting Edges written by James E. Gill and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in Cutting Edges examine English satire of the eighteenth century from various theory-based postmodern perspectives. Some examine little-known works that postmodern concerns, such as the role of women and the problems of authorship, have rendered especially interesting; others reconsider familiar works in terms of the latest critical issues. The justification for these investigations is that both satire and postmodern methods are extremely skeptical and acutely aware that language is always ironic - always pointing to the gap between signifier and signified. The approaches in this book include those associated with deconstruction, reception theory, Marxist criticism, the new historicism, and various feminist criticisms, and with such theorists as Derrida, Bakhtin, Goux, and Luhmann. While most of the major figures of eighteenth-century satire - Butler, Rochester, Swift, Pope, Gay, Fielding, Sterne, and Johnson - are represented here, so too are many other interesting writers - Thomas Shadwell, Fannie Burney, Mary Davys, and Elizabeth Hamilton, to name but a few.

Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater

Download Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820337897
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater by : Deborah Payne Fisk

Download or read book Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater written by Deborah Payne Fisk and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging in approach from feminist to historicist, the eleven essays in this collection share the culturalist premise that the drama of late Stuart and early Georgian England helped to constitute the dominant ideology of the period. The contributors' varied approaches allow for the reconsideration of libertinism, the politics of sexual desire, and other classic issues, as well as such newer concerns as the social construction of the first English actresses, empiricism as an emergent epistemological discourse, cultural anxiety about novelty and repetition, and shifting tropes of inherent worth. By reading well-known works in unexpected ways and focusing on less frequently studied dramatists, from Sedley, Motteux, Pix, and Behn to Manley, Trotter, and Shadwell, the contributors also test the limits of the canon. In addition, they suggest that earlier critical perceptions, perhaps even more than the “innate worth” of the plays, determined the shape of the canon. These essays present a different image of Restoration and eighteenth-century theater, one that reveals how the drama was a site as important for the negotiation of cultural meaning as were novels and verse satires.

Thought and Action in Old English Poetry and Prose

Download Thought and Action in Old English Poetry and Prose PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 1501514458
Total Pages : 235 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (15 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Thought and Action in Old English Poetry and Prose by : Eleni Ponirakis

Download or read book Thought and Action in Old English Poetry and Prose written by Eleni Ponirakis and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-12-31 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cognitive approaches to early medieval texts have tended to focus on the mind in isolation. By examining the interplay between mental and physical acts deployed in Old English poetry and prose, this study identifies new patterns and offers new perspectives. In these texts, the performance of right or wrong action is not linked to natural inclination dictated by birth; it is the fruit of right or wrong thinking. The mind consciously directed and controlled is open to external influences, both human and diabolical. This struggle to produce right thought and action reflects an emerging democratization of heroism that crosses societal and gender boundaries, becoming intertwined with socio-political, soteriological, and cultural meaning. In a study of influential prose texts, including the Alfredian translations and the sermons of Ælfric, alongside close readings of three poems from different genres – The Seafarer, The Battle of Maldon, and Juliana –, Ponirakis demonstrates how early medieval authors create patterns of interaction between the mental and the physical. These provide hidden keys to meaning which, once found, unlock new readings of much studied texts. In addition, these patterns of balance, distribution, and opposition, reveal a startling similarity of approach across genre and form, taking the discussion of the early medieval conception of the mind, soul, and emotion, not to mention conventional generic divisions, onto new ground.

Broken Boundaries

Download Broken Boundaries PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813159997
Total Pages : 357 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (131 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Broken Boundaries by : Katherine M. Quinsey

Download or read book Broken Boundaries written by Katherine M. Quinsey and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of twelve original essays is the first comprehensive study of feminist issues in Restoration drama. The late seventeenth century marks a pivotal era in the history of feminism, when Renaissance assumptions about gender and patriarchy were being directly challenged. For the first time, women appeared onstage as actresses, made their presence felt as spectators and patrons, and wrote a number of the plays produced in theaters. In an unusually direct and probing way, drama of the Restoration period raised radical questions about the place of women in the family and in society, and about the essential nature of men and women. The essays examine feminist issues from a variety of historical and theoretical approaches across a spectrum of plays—comedies, tragedies, tragicomedies, and heroic drama. By addressing the acute questions of gender raised in the drama, Broken Boundaries presents a vivid portrait of the uncertainties and changing perceptions in all areas of intellectual, political, and social life during the last decades of the seventeenth century.

Sworn Bond in Tudor England

Download Sworn Bond in Tudor England PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 0786486767
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (864 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Sworn Bond in Tudor England by : Thea Cervone

Download or read book Sworn Bond in Tudor England written by Thea Cervone and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2011-07-25 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The swearing of oaths is a cultural phenomenon that pervades English history and was remarkably important during the sixteenth century. This multi-disciplinary work explores how writers of the Tudor era addressed the subject in response to the profound changes of the Reformation and the creative explosion of the Elizabethan period. Topics include how the art of rhetoric was deployed in polemic, the way in which oaths formed bonds between Church and State, and how oaths functioned in literature, as ceremony and as a language England used to describe itself during times of radical change.

The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature

Download The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Delaware Press
ISBN 13 : 9780874138344
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (383 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature by : John Douglas Canfield

Download or read book The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature written by John Douglas Canfield and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, J. Douglas Canfield contends that baroque disruption persists even as English literature becomes more neoclassical. It twists forms and meanings. From paradoxical, mysterious moments in Paradise Lost, amazing metaphorics in Cavendish and Philips, momentous materializations in Waller and Dorset, and revealing displacements in Buckingham and Rochester to outrageous attack in Dryden and Pope, astonishing ventriloquizing in Killigrew and Finch and Montagu, and eccentricity and grotesquerie in Gulliver's Travels - the baroque comes back to disturb neoclassical regularity.--BOOK JACKET.

From Text to Hypertext

Download From Text to Hypertext PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 151280228X
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (128 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis From Text to Hypertext by : Silvio Gaggi

Download or read book From Text to Hypertext written by Silvio Gaggi and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-07-27 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a tenet of postmodern writing that the subject—the self—is unstable, fragmented, and decentered. One useful way to examine this principle is to look at how the subject has been treated in various media in the premodern, modern, and postmodern eras. Silvio Gaggi pursues this strategy in From Text to Hypertext, analyzing the issue of subject construction and deconstruction in selected examples of visual art, literature, film, and electronic media. Gaggi concentrates on a few paradigmatic works in each chapter; he contrasts van Eyck's Wedding of Arnolfini with the photography of Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger; examines fiction that centers on an elusive subject in works by Conrad, Faulkner, and Calvino; and explores the ability of such films as Coppola's One from the Heart and Altman's The Player to emancipate the subject through cinematography and editing. In considering electronic media, Gaggi takes his argument to an entirely new level. He focuses on computer-controlled media, specifically examples of hypertextual fiction by Michael Joyce and Stuart Moulthrop. Besides recognizing how the computer has enabled artists to create works of fiction in which readers themselves become decentered, Gaggi also observes the impact of literature created on computer networks, where even the limitations of CD-ROM are lifted and the notion of individual authorship may for all practical purposes be lost.

Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, and the Rise of Sensibility, 1670-1730

Download Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, and the Rise of Sensibility, 1670-1730 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317154843
Total Pages : 184 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, and the Rise of Sensibility, 1670-1730 by : Laura Linker

Download or read book Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, and the Rise of Sensibility, 1670-1730 written by Laura Linker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first full-length study of the figure of the female libertine in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century literature, Laura Linker examines heroines appearing in literature by John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Catharine Trotter, Delariviere Manley, and Daniel Defoe. Linker argues that this figure, partially inspired by Epicurean ideas found in Lucretius's De rerum natura, interrogates gender roles and assumptions and emerges as a source of considerable tension during the late Stuart and early Georgian periods. Witty and rebellious, the female libertine becomes a frequent satiric target because of her transgressive sexuality. As a result of negative portrayals of lady libertines, women writers begin to associate their libertine heroines with the pathos figures they read in French texts of sensibilité. Beginning with a discussion of Charles II's mistresses, Linker shows that these women continue to serve as models for the female libertine in literature long after their "reigns" at court ended. Her study places the female libertine within her cultural, philosophical, and literary contexts and suggests new ways of considering women's participation and the early novel, which prominently features female libertines as heroines of sensibility.

Shakespeare and the Grace of Words

Download Shakespeare and the Grace of Words PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000582558
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (5 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Shakespeare and the Grace of Words by : Valentin Gerlier

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Grace of Words written by Valentin Gerlier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-29 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crossing the boundaries between literature, philosophy and theology, Shakespeare and the Grace of Words pioneers a reading strategy that approaches language as grounded in praise; that is, as affirmation and articulation of the goodness of Being. Offering a metaphysically astute theology of language grounded in the thought of Renaissance theologian Nicholas of Cusa, as well as readings of Shakespeare that instantiate and complement its approach, this book shows that language in which the divine gift of Being is received, apprehended and expressed, even amidst darkness and despair, is language that can renew our relationship with one another and with the things and beings of the world. Shakespeare and the Grace of Words aims to engage the reader in detailed, performative close readings while exploring the metaphysical and theological contours of Shakespeare’s art—as a venture into a poetic illumination of the deep grammar of the real.

Tragedy: The Basics

Download Tragedy: The Basics PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317629884
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (176 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Tragedy: The Basics by : Sean McEvoy

Download or read book Tragedy: The Basics written by Sean McEvoy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tragedy: The Basics is an accessible and up-to-date introduction to dramatic tragedy. A comprehensive guide for anyone undertaking a study of the genre, it provides a chronological overview and history of tragic theory. Covering tragedy from the classics to the present day, it explains the contextual and theoretical issues which affect the interpretation of tragedy, examining popularly studied key plays in order to show historical change. Including a glossary of key terms and suggestions for further reading, Tragedy: The Basics is an ideal starting point for anyone studying tragedy in literature or theatre studies.

Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy

Download Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0312292759
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (122 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy by : M. Anderson

Download or read book Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy written by M. Anderson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-02-22 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aphra Behn, Susannah Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald were the only four female playwrights in England with multiple comic successes from 1670-1800. Behn's interest in the body, Centlivre's fascination with written contracts, Cowley's nationalism, and Inchbald's discussion of divorce emerge in the comic events that are animated by the psychological mechanisms of humor. Attending to the dialogue between these comic events and the plays' more predictable comic endings illuminates the philosophical, political, and legal arguments about women and marriage that fascinated both female playwrights and the theatergoing public.

Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory

Download Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1843844176
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (438 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory by : Jamie McKinstry

Download or read book Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory written by Jamie McKinstry and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the depiction and function of memory in a variety of romances, including Troilus and Criseyde and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Rochester and the pursuit of pleasure

Download Rochester and the pursuit of pleasure PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526173662
Total Pages : 398 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (261 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Rochester and the pursuit of pleasure by : Larry D Carver

Download or read book Rochester and the pursuit of pleasure written by Larry D Carver and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rochester and the pursuit of pleasure provides a reading of Rochester’s poems, dramatic works, and letters in a biographical context. In doing so, it sheds light on a central vexed issue in Rochester criticism, the relationship of the poet to his speaker. It also reveals that Rochester’s work clusters about a central theme, the pursuit of pleasure, a pursuit motivated by a courtship of purity that grew out of Rochester’s Christian and God-fearing upbringing. This rhetoric of courtship, in turn, reveals the unity of Rochester’s work as the courtier and his various personae try to persuade his audiences, secular and divine, of his worth.

Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale

Download Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 9780802043665
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (436 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale by : Geoffrey Chaucer

Download or read book Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale written by Geoffrey Chaucer and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chaucer Bibliography series aims to provide annotated bibliographies for all of Chaucer's work. This book summarizes 20th-century commentaries on Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Prologue" and "Tale."

Shakespeare's Religious Language

Download Shakespeare's Religious Language PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1472577299
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (725 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Shakespeare's Religious Language by : R. Chris Hassel Jr.

Download or read book Shakespeare's Religious Language written by R. Chris Hassel Jr. and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-03-26 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious issues and discourse are key to an understanding of Shakespeare's plays and poems. This dictionary discusses over 1000 words and names in Shakespeare's works that have a religious connotation. Its unique word-by-word approach allows equal consideration of the full nuance of each of these words, from 'abbess' to 'zeal'. It also gradually reveals the persistence, the variety, and the sophistication of Shakespeare's religious usage. Frequent attention is given to the prominence of Reformation controversy in these words, and to Shakespeare's often ingenious and playful metaphoric usage of them. Theological commonplaces assume a major place in the dictionary, as do overt references to biblical figures, biblical stories and biblical place-names; biblical allusions; church figures and saints.