Deixis In The Early Modern English Lyric Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like Here This Come

This book engages with deictics ('pointing' words like here/there, this/that) of space. It focuses on texts by Donne, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Wroth in particular, relating their forms of deixis to cultural and generic developments; but it also suggests parallels with both iconic and neglected texts from a range of later historical periods.

This book engages with deictics ('pointing' words like here/there, this/that) of space. It focuses on texts by Donne, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Wroth in particular, relating their forms of deixis to cultural and generic developments; but it also suggests parallels with both iconic and neglected texts from a range of later historical periods.

Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England is the first book-length study of early modern English playbook typography. It tells a new history of drama from the period by considering the page designs of plays by Shakespeare and others printed between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. It argues that typography, broadly conceived, was used creatively by printers, publishers, playwrights, and other agents of the book trade to make the effects of theatricality--from the most basic (textually articulating a change in speaker) to the more complex (registering the kinesis of bodies on stage)--intelligible on the page. The coalescence of these experiments into a uniquely dramatic typography that was constantly responsive to performance effects made it possible for 'plays' to be marketed, collected, and read in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a print genre distinct from all other genres of imaginative writing. It has been said, 'If a play is a book, it is not a play.' Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England shows that 'play' and 'book' were, in fact, mutually constitutive: it was the very bookishness of plays printed in early modern England that allowed them to be recognized by their earliest readers as plays in the first place.

Early Modern Histories of Time examines how a range of chronological modes intrinsic to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shaped the thought-worlds of those living during this time and explores how these temporally indigenous models can productively influence our own working concepts of historical period. This innovative approach thus moves beyond debates about where we should divide linear time (and what to call the ensuing segments) to reconsider the very concept of "period." Bringing together an eminent cast of literary scholars and historians, the volume develops productive historical models by drawing on the very texts and cultural contexts that are their objects of study. What happens to the idea of "period" when English literature is properly placed within the dynamic currents of pan-European literary phenomena? How might we think of historical period through the palimpsested nature of buildings, through the religious concept of the secular, through the demographic model of the life cycle, even through the repetitive labor of laundering? From theology to material culture to the temporal constructions of Shakespeare, and from the politics of space to the poetics of typology, the essays in this volume take up diverse, complex models of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century temporality and contemplate their current relevance for our own ideas of history. The volume thus embraces the ambiguity inherent in the word "contemporary," moving between our subjects' sense of self-emplacement and the historiographical need to address the questions and concerns that affect us today. Contributors: Douglas Bruster, Euan Cameron, Heather Dubrow, Kate Giles, Tim Harris, Natasha Korda, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Kristen Poole, Ethan H. Shagan, James Simpson, Nigel Smith, Mihoko Suzuki, Gordon Teskey, Julianne Werlin, Owen Williams, Steven N. Zwicker.

This volume examines the relationship between gender and form in early modern women's writing by exploring women's debts to and appropriations of different literary genres and offering practical suggestions for the teaching of women's texts.

The Spirit Says offers a stunning collection of articles by an influential assemblage of scholars, all of whom lend considerable insight to the relationship between inspiration and interpretation. They address this otherwise intractable question with deft and occasionally daring readings of a variety of texts from the ancient world, including—but not limited to—the scriptures of early Judaism and Christianity. The thrust of this book can be summed up not so much in one question as in four: o What is the role of revelation in the interpretation of Scripture? o What might it look like for an author to be inspired? o What motivates a claim to the inspired interpretation of Scripture? o Who is inspired to interpret Scripture? More often than not, these questions are submerged in this volume under the tame rubrics of exegesis and hermeneutics, but they rise in swells and surges too to the surface, not just occasionally but often. Combining an assortment of prominent voices, this book does not merely offer signposts along the way. It charts a pioneering path toward a model of interpretation that is at once intellectually robust and unmistakably inspired.

When poetry was printed, poets and their publishers could no longer take for granted that readers would have the necessary knowledge and skill to read it well. By making poems available to anyone who either had the means to a buy a book or knew someone who did, print publication radically expanded the early modern reading public. These new readers, publishers feared, might not buy or like the books. Worse, their misreadings could put the authors, the publishers, or the readers themselves at risk. Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England focuses on early modern publishers' efforts to identify and accommodate new readers of verse that had previously been restricted to particular social networks in manuscript. Focusing on the period between the maturing of the market for printed English literature in the 1590s and the emergence of the professional poet following the Restoration, this study shows that poetry was shaped by—and itself shaped—strong print publication traditions. By reading printed editions of poems by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and others, this book shows how publishers negotiated genre, gender, social access, reputation, literary knowledge, and the value of English literature itself. It uses literary, historical, bibliographical, and quantitative evidence to show how publishers' strategies changed over time. Ultimately, Doubtful Readers argues that although—or perhaps because—publishers' interpretive and editorial efforts are often elided in studies of early modern poetry, their interventions have had an enduring impact on our canons, texts, and literary histories.

In Making the Miscellany Megan Heffernan examines the poetic design of early modern printed books and explores how volumes of compiled poems, which have always existed in practice, responded to media change in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Heffernan's focus is not only the material organization of printed poetry, but also how those conventions and innovations of arrangement contributed to vernacular poetic craft, the consolidation of ideals of individual authorship, and centuries of literary history. The arrangement of printed compilations contains a largely unstudied and undertheorized archive of poetic form, Heffernan argues. In an evolving system of textual transmission, compilers were experimenting with how to contain individual poems within larger volumes. By paying attention to how they navigated and shaped the exchanges between poems and their organization, she reveals how we can witness the basic power of imaginative writing over the material text. Making the Miscellany is also a study of how this history of textual design has been differently told by the distinct disciplines of bibliography or book history and literary studies, each of which has handled—and obscured—the formal qualities of early modern poetry compilations and the practices that produced them. Revisiting these editorial and critical approaches, this book recovers a moment when compilers, poets, and readers were alert to a poetics of organization that exceeded the limits of the individual poem.