Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature

At the same time, the book forecasts how ecocriticism will bolster the reputation of less canonical authors like Drayton, Wroth, Bruno, Gascoigne, and Cavendish.

Author: Todd A. Borlik

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781136741807

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 292

View: 451

DOWNLOAD →

In this timely new study, Borlik reveals the surprisingly rich potential for the emergent "green" criticism to yield fresh insights into early modern English literature. Deftly avoiding the anachronistic casting of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors as modern environmentalists, he argues that environmental issues, such as nature’s personhood, deforestation, energy use, air quality, climate change, and animal sentience, are formative concerns in many early modern texts. The readings infuse a new urgency in familiar works by Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Ralegh, Jonson, Donne, and Milton. At the same time, the book forecasts how ecocriticism will bolster the reputation of less canonical authors like Drayton, Wroth, Bruno, Gascoigne, and Cavendish. Its chapters trace provocative affinities between topics such as Pythagorean ecology and the Gaia hypothesis, Ovidian tropes and green phenomenology, the disenchantment of Nature and the Little Ice Age, and early modern pastoral poetry and modern environmental ethics. It also examines the ecological onus of Renaissance poetics, while showcasing how the Elizabethans’ sense of a sophisticated interplay between nature and art can provide a precedent for ecocriticism’s current understanding of the relationship between nature and culture as "mutually constructive." Situating plays and poems alongside an eclectic array of secondary sources, including herbals, forestry laws, husbandry manuals, almanacs, and philosophical treatises on politics and ethics, Borlik demonstrates that Elizabethan and Jacobean authors were very much aware of, and concerned about, the impact of human beings on their natural surroundings.
408 Download

The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature

and Marvell (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007); Ken Hiltner, Milton and Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ... Ecocriticism in Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures (New York: Routledge, 2011); and Bruce Boehrer, ...

Author: Peter Remien

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 9781108496810

Category: Art

Page: 244

View: 762

DOWNLOAD →

Participates in an intellectual history of ecology while prompting a re-evaluation of nature in the early modern period.
661 Download

Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts

As a whole, the volume includes a diverse selection of chapters that engage the complex issues that arise when reading and teaching early modern texts from a green perspective.

Author: Jennifer Munroe

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781317146346

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 274

View: 119

DOWNLOAD →

Ecocriticism has steadily gained footing within the larger arena of early modern scholarship, and with the publication of well over a dozen monographs, essay collections, and special journal issues, literary studies looks increasingly ’green’; yet the field lacks a straightforward, easy-to-use guide to do with reading and teaching early modern texts ecocritically. Accessible yet comprehensive, the cutting-edge collection Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts fills this gap. Organized around the notion of contact zones (or points of intersection, that have often been constructed asymmetrically-especially with regard to the human-nonhuman dichotomy), the volume reassesses current trends in ecocriticism and the Renaissance; introduces analyses of neglected texts and authors; brings ecocriticism into conversation with cognate fields and approaches (e.g., queer theory, feminism, post-coloniality, food studies); and offers a significant section on pedagogy, ecocriticism and early modern literature. Engaging points of tension and central interest in the field, the collection is largely situated in the 'and/or' that resides between presentism-historicism, materiality-literary, somatic-semiotic, nature-culture, and, most importantly, human-nonhuman. Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts balances coverage and methodology; its primary goal is to provide useful, yet nuanced discussions of ecological approaches to reading and teaching a range of representative early modern texts. As a whole, the volume includes a diverse selection of chapters that engage the complex issues that arise when reading and teaching early modern texts from a green perspective.
839 Download

Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety

... The' S. Cohen 113 'Earth's Prospects,' Lowell Duckert 157 Eco, Umberto 18 ecocriticism 12, 107–8, 157 Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures, Todd Andrew Borlik 107 ecology 3, 107–8 ecomaterialism 12 Eden, ...

Author: Chris Barrett

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780198816874

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 256

View: 133

DOWNLOAD →

The Cartographic Revolution in the Renaissance made maps newly precise, newly affordable, and newly ubiquitous. In sixteenth-century Britain, cartographic materials went from rarity to household decor within a single lifetime, and they delighted, inspired, and fascinated people across the socioeconomic spectrum. At the same time, they also unsettled, upset, disturbed, and sometimes angered their early modern readers. Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety is the first monograph dedicated to recovering the shadow history of the many anxieties provoked by early modern maps and mapping in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A product of a military arms race, often deployed for security and surveillance purposes, and fundamentally distortive of their subjects, maps provoked suspicion, unease, and even hostility in early modern Britain (in ways not dissimilar from the anxieties provoked by global positioning-enabled digital mapping in the twenty-first century). At the same time, writers saw in the resistance to cartographic logics and strategies the opportunity to rethink the way literature represents spaceand everything else. This volume explores three major poems of the periodEdmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), and John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667, 1674)in terms of their vexed and vexing relationships with cartographic materials, and shows how the productive protest staged by these texts redefined concepts of allegory, description, personification, bibliographic materiality, narrative, temporality, analogy, and other elemental components of literary representations.
267 Download

The Experience of Disaster in Early Modern English Literature

He is the author of Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature, Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Anthology, and over a dozen articles in academic journals such as Shakespeare Bulletin, ...

Author: Sophie Chiari

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781000569919

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 198

View: 702

DOWNLOAD →

This book addresses the concept of ‘disaster’ through a variety of literary texts dating back to the early modern period. While Shakespeare’s age, which was an era of colonisation, certainly marked a turning point in men and women’s relations with nature, the present times seem to announce the advent of environmental justice in spite of the massive ecological destructions that have contributed to reshape our planet. Between then and now, a whole history of climatic disasters and of their artistic depictions needs to be traced. The literary representations of eco-catastrophes, in particular, have consistently fashioned the English identity and led to the progress of science and the ‘advancement of learning’. They have also obliged us to adapt, recycle and innovate. How could the destructive process entailed by ecological disasters be represented on the page and thereby transformed into a creative process encouraging meditation, preservation and resilience in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? To this question, this book offers nuanced, contextualised and perceptive answers. Divided into three main sections ‘Extreme Conditions’, ‘Tempestuous Skies’, and ‘Biblical Calamities,' it deals with the major environmental issues of our time through the prism of early modern culture and literature.
602 Download

Male to Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature

Routledge. Studies. in. Renaissance. Literature. and. Culture. 1 9 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 ... and Sibylline Imagery in the Renaissance Shakespeare's Sibyls Jessica L. Malay Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature Green ...

Author: Simone Chess

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781317360865

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 196

View: 552

DOWNLOAD →

This volume examines and theorizes the oft-ignored phenomenon of male-to-female (MTF) crossdressing in early modern drama, prose, and poetry, inviting MTF crossdressing episodes to take a fuller place alongside instances of female-to-male crossdressing and boy actors’ crossdressing, which have long held the spotlight in early modern gender studies. The author argues that MTF crossdressing episodes are especially rich sources for socially-oriented readings of queer gender—that crossdressers’ genders are constructed and represented in relation to romantic partners, communities, and broader social structures like marriage, economy, and sexuality. Further, she argues that these relational representations show that the crossdresser and his/her allies often benefit financially, socially, and erotically from his/her queer gender presentation, a corrective to the dominant idea that queer gender has always been associated with shame, containment, and correction. By attending to these relational and beneficial representations of MTF crossdressers in early modern literature, the volume helps to make a larger space for queer, genderqueer, male-bodied and queer-feminine representations in our conversations about early modern gender and sexuality.
498 Download

Reading Green in Early Modern England

5 For recent work on early modern ecologically-oriented cultural studies, see (in reversed chronological order) Jennifer ... See also Karen Raber's review essay, “Recent Ecocritical Studies of English Renaissance Literature,” English ...

Author: Leah Knight

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781317071235

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 180

View: 582

DOWNLOAD →

Green in early modern England did not mean what it does today; but what did it mean? Unveiling various versions and interpretations of green, this book offers a cultural history of a color that illuminates the distinctive valences greenness possessed in early modern culture. While treating green as a panacea for anything from sore eyes to sick minds, early moderns also perceived verdure as responsive to their verse, sympathetic to their sufferings, and endowed with surprising powers of animation. Author Leah Knight explores the physical and figurative potentials of green as they were understood in Renaissance England, including some that foreshadow our paradoxical dependence on and sacrifice of the green world. Ranging across contexts from early modern optics and olfaction to horticulture and herbal health care, this study explores a host of human encounters with the green world: both the impressions we make upon it and those it leaves with us. The first two chapters consider the value placed on two ways of taking green into early modern bodies and minds-by seeing it and breathing it in-while the next two address the manipulation of greenery by Orphic poets and medicinal herbalists as well as grafters and graffiti artists. A final chapter suggests that early modern modes of treating green wounds might point toward a new kind of intertextual ecology of reading and writing. Reading Green in Early Modern England mines many pages from the period - not literally but tropically, metaphorically green - that cultivate a variety of unexpected meanings of green and the atmosphere and powers it exuded in the early modern world.
241 Download

Geographies of Embodiment in Early Modern England

... Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2006); Egan, Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Karen Raber, 'Recent Ecocritical Studies of Renaissance Literature, English Literary ...

Author: Mary Floyd-Wilson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780192594273

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 288

View: 445

DOWNLOAD →

Geographies of Embodiment in Early Modern England gathers essays from prominent scholars of English Renaissance literature and history who have made substantial contributions to the study of early modern embodiment, historical phenomenology, affect, cognition, memory, and natural philosophy. It provides new interpretations of the geographic dimensions of early modern embodiment, emphasizing the transactional and dynamic aspects of the relationship between body and world. The geographies of embodiment encompass both cognitive processes and cosmic environments, and inner emotional states as well as affective landscapes. Rather than always being territorialized onto individual bodies, ideas about early modern embodiment are varied both in their scope and in terms of their representation. Reflecting this variety, this volume offers up a range of inquiries into how early modern writers accounted for the exchanges between the microcosm and macrocosm. It engages with Gail Kern Paster's groundbreaking scholarship on embodiment, humoralism, the passions, and historical phenomenology throughout, and offers new readings of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, John Milton, and others. Contributions consider the epistemiologies of navigation and cartography, the significance of geohumoralism, the ethics of self-mastery, theories of early modern cosmology, the construction of place memory, and perceptions of an animate spirit world.
150 Download

Early Modern cologies

It is the first, however, to focus exclusively on the possible connections between early modern French literature and ... While recognizing ourselves in and building on English early modern ecocriticism, we also felt that our own ...

Author: Pauline Goul

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

ISBN: 9789048537211

Category: History

Page: 298

View: 449

DOWNLOAD →

Early Modern Écologies is the first collective volume to offer perspectives on the relationship between contemporary ecological thought and early modern French literature. If Descartes spoke of humans as being "masters and possessors of Nature" in the seventeenth century, the writers taken up in this volume arguably demonstrated a more complex and urgent understanding of the human relationship to our shared planet. Opening up a rich archive of literary and non-literary texts produced by Montaigne and his contemporaries, this volume foregrounds not how ecocriticism renews our understanding of a literary corpus, but rather how that corpus causes us to re-think or to nuance contemporary eco-theory. The sparsely bilingual title (an acute accent on écologies) denotes the primary task at hand: to pluralize (i.e. de-Anglophone-ize) the Environmental Humanities. Featuring established and emerging scholars from Europe and the United States, Early Modern Écologies opens up new dialogues between eco-theorists such as Timothy Morton, Gilles Deleuze, and Bruno Latour and Montaigne, Ronsard, Du Bartas, and Olivier de Serres.
360 Download

Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance

Featuring over two hundred nature-themed texts spanning the disciplines of literature, science and history, this sourcebook offers an accessible field guide to the environment of Renaissance England, revealing a nation at a crossroads ...

Author: Todd Andrew Borlik

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 9781108247009

Category: Literary Criticism

Page:

View: 545

DOWNLOAD →

Featuring over two hundred nature-themed texts spanning the disciplines of literature, science and history, this sourcebook offers an accessible field guide to the environment of Renaissance England, revealing a nation at a crossroads between its pastoral heritage and industrialized future. Carefully selected primary sources, each modernized and prefaced with an introduction, survey an encyclopaedic array of topographies, species, and topics: from astrology to zoology, bear-baiting to bee-keeping, coal-mining to tree-planting, fen-draining to sheep-whispering. The familiar voices of Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marvell mingle with a diverse chorus of farmers, herbalists, shepherds, hunters, foresters, philosophers, sailors, sky-watchers, and duchesses - as well as ventriloquized beasts, trees, and rivers. Lavishly illustrated, the anthology is supported by a lucid introduction that outlines and intervenes in key debates in Renaissance ecocriticism, a reflective essay on ecocritical editing, a bibliography of further reading, and a timeline of environmental history and legislation drawing on extensive archival research.
125 Download