María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro and Silvia Pellicer-Ortín (eds.), Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature

Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

294pp.

ISBN: 978-3-319-61758-9,
ISBN (eBook): 978-3-319-61759-6

Description

The essays that make up the collection delve into both the treatment of memory in literature and the view of literature as a medium of memory, paying special attention to major controversies attending the representation and (re)construction of individual, cultural and collective memories in literary narratives in English published from 1990 to the present. Focusing on texts written by authors from diverse backgrounds —Great Britain, South-Korea, the USA, Cuba, Australia, Burma, as well as Native-American Indian and African-American writers— this book attempts to explore the multifarious representational strategies used by contemporary writers so as to textualise memory and its friction areas through literary practices. The contributors to the collection analyse a good range of memory frictions —in connection with melancholic mourning, immigration, diaspora, genocide, perpetration and victimhood, dialogic witnessing, memorialisation practices, inherited traumatic memories, murder, sexual abuse, prostitution, etc.— by making use of various disciplines —such as psychoanalysis, ethics, politics, space theories, postcolonial studies, narratology, feminism and gender studies, critical studies in food and culture— resulting in a volume that is genuinely contemporary and committed to cross-cultural ethical engagement.

Contents

Introduction: Memory Frictions: Conflict-Negotiation-Politics. María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro and Silvia Pellicer-Ortín

Part I: Experimentation and Genre: Formal Memory Frictions

• The Powers of Vulnerability: The Restorative Uses
of Elegy. Jean-Michel Ganteau
• Narrative Form, Memory Frictions and the Revelation
of Traumatic Secrets in Toni Morrison’s Home. Susana Onega
• The Zigzag Trajectory through Time of Colum
McCann’s TransAtlantic. Sandra Singer

Part II: Collective Tensions and the Politics of Remembrance

• Public Art and Communal Space: The Politics of Commemoration in Amy Waldman’s The Submission. Paula Martín-Salván
• A Korean “Apocryphal” Island, Once the Shore, by Paul
Yoon. Marc Amfreville
• False Memories, False Foods: Eating, Cooking,
Remembering in Tastes like Cuba by Eduardo Machado. Nieves Pascual Soler

Part III: The Haunting Presence of the Holocaust: Multidirectional, Transgenerational and Memorial Struggles

• The Holocaust in the Eye of the Beholder: Memory in
Carmel Bird’s The Bluebird Café. Bárbara Arizti
• Lore, or the Implicated Witness: Rachel Seiffert’s
Postmemory Work. Susanne Baackmann
• “No Redress but Memory”: Holocaust Representation
and Memorialization in E.L. Doctorow’s City of God. María Ferrández San Miguel

Part IV: Mapping Memories, Spatial F(r)ictions and Troubled Identities

• Re-Mapping the Trauma Paradigm: The Politics
of Native American Grief in Louise Erdrich’s “Shamengwa”. Silvia Martínez-Falquina
• Remembering the Way Back Home: The Role of Place
in Wendy Law-Yone’s The Road to Wanting. Dolores Herrero
• Negotiating Traumatic Memories in Louise Erdrich’s
The Round House: White Man’s Law vs. Native Justice
and Tradition. Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz

Conclusion. Robert Eaglestone

Editors

María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro is  Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Zaragoza (Spain).

Silvia Pellicer-Ortín is Lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology in the Faculty of Education of the University of Zaragoza (Spain).

Further details

http://www.palgrave.com/la/book/9783319617589
http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319617589

Marianne Kac-Vergne, Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema

Publisher: I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd, London

Series: Library of Gender and Popular Culture
Hardback
ISBN: 9781780767482
Publication Date: 18 Dec 2017
Number of Pages: 256
Height: 216
Width: 138
Illustrations: 25 bw integrated

If science fiction stages the battle between humans and non-humans, whether alien or machine, who is elected to fight for us? In the classics of science fiction cinema, humanity is nearly always represented by a male, and until recently, a white male. Spanning landmark American films from Blade Runner to Avatar, this major new study offers the first ever analysis of masculinity in science fiction cinema. It uncovers the evolution of masculine heroes from the 1980s until the present day, and the roles played by their feminine counterparts. Considering gender alongside racial and class politics, Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema also situates filmic examples within the broader culture. It is indispensable for understanding science fiction and its role in contemporary cultural politics.

About the author:

Marianne Kac-Vergne is Lecturer at the Universite de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, France, where she teaches courses in American cultural history at graduate and undergraduate levels. Her research focuses on gender and genre in American cinema, and she has published and presented on masculinity and femininity in science fiction, romantic comedy and western films.

Reviews:

‘A must read about gender politics in popular culture, this is a revealing and original historical study about constructed male identities in the flourishing genre of science fiction. Marianne Kac-Vergne eloquently coins key developments in the depiction of (hyper)masculinity in Hollywood blockbusters and traces the 1980s heroes with bulging muscles and hard bodies to the twenty-first century- sci-fi-species equipped with clever minds and a heart. The only staple: women stay on the sidelines while hegemonic masculinity rules. In the current political climate Kac-Vergne teaches us invaluable new insights to engage with the ideas of race and gender in mainstream film’ – Karen A. Ritzenhoff, Professor, Department of Communication, Central Connecticut State University

‘Marianne Kac-Vergne’s Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: Cyborgs, Troopers and Other Men of the Future is a brilliant analysis of contemporary science-fiction cinema. It will appeal to academics and students in film studies, gender studies, and cultural studies alike: its smart contextualizations, subtle commentary of intertexts and astute close readings, combined with strong intersectional analyses of the masculinity in these well-known films will prompt re-viewing in another light. Broader audiences will find this is a highly enjoyable read, with a dose of wit and wry humor. This is truly a must-read for anyone who watches, studies, or indeed, makes science fiction films today’. – Monica Michlin, Professor of Contemporary American Studies, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier

Anne Etienne and Thierry Dubost (eds.), Perspectives on Contemporary Irish Theatre: Populating the Stage

Palgrave-Macmillan

ISBN 978-3-319-59710-2
301 pages

This book addresses the notion posed by Thomas Kilroy in his definition of a playwright’s creative process: ‘We write plays, I feel, in order to populate the stage’. It gathers eclectic reflections on contemporary Irish theatre from both Irish theatre practitioners and international academics. The eighteen contributions offer innovative perspectives on Irish theatre since the early 1990s up to the present, testifying to the development of themes explored by emerging and established playwrights as well as to the (r)evolutions in practices and approaches to the stage that have taken place in the last thirty years.
This cross-disciplinary collection devotes as much attention to contextual questions and approaches to the stage in practice as it does to the play text in its traditional and revised forms. The essays and interviews encourage dialectic exchange between analytical studies on contemporary Irish theatre and contributions by theatre practitioners.

Anne Etienne is Lecturer in Modern Drama at University College Cork, Ireland. She has published widely on theatre censorship in twentieth-century England, and is the main author of Theatre Censorship: from Walpole to Wilson (2007). She is currently expanding her work on Arnold Wesker. Her research in contemporary Irish theatre is devoted to Corcadorca Theatre Company.

Thierry Dubost is Professor of Literatures in English at the University of Caen Basse-Normandie, France. He is the author of Struggle, Defeat or Rebirth: Eugene O’Neill’s Vision of Humanity (1997) and The Plays of Thomas Kilroy (2007). He has co-edited a number of volumes on Irish drama and culture

Guillaume Coatalen, Two Elizabethan Treatises on Rhetoric: The Foundacion of Rhetorike by Richard Reynolds (1563) and A Brief Discourse of Rhetorike by William Medley (1575)

Brill, 2017

ISBN13: 9789004322301
E-ISBN: 9789004356344

Sixteenth century Elizabethan treatises on rhetoric in the vernacular are relatively rare. Guillaume Coatalen offers annotated editions of Richard Reynolds’s The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), which has not been edited since the 1945 facsimile edition, and of William Medley’s unknown Brief Discourse on Rhetoricke which survives in a single manuscript dated 1575. While Reynolds’s work is an English adaptation of Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata and a preparation for Thomas Wilson’s influential Arte of Rhetoricke (1560), Medley’s is broader in scope and contains the only full treatment of periodic prose in English in the period. Both works are essential to understand how Elizabethan rhetoric in the vernacular evolved, in particular in aristocratic circles, and its links with Continental developments, notably German.

Biographical note

Guillaume Coatalen, Ph.D (2002), University of Cergy-Pontoise (France), is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance English literature with a strong interest in manuscripts. He co-edited with Carlo Bajetta and Jonathan Gibson, Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence: Letters, Rhetoric, and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Readership

Specialists working on Renaissance rhetoric and more specifically sixteenth century English rhetoric. Historians researching Puritan discourses and Elizabethan court culture.

Table of contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Sigla and Abbreviations

Introduction

Richard Reynolds, The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563)

William Medley, A Brief Discourse of Rhetorike (1575), Cecil Papers MS 238/6

Bibliography
Index Nominum
Index Rerum

Claude Maisonnat, Joseph Conrad and the Voicing of Textuality

Published by Maria Curie-Sklodowska University Press, Lublin

Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York
June 2017
ISBN: 9788377849309
416 Pages
Format: Hardcover

Joseph Conrad and the Voicing of Textuality offers an original approach to Conrad’s work rooted in linguistics and psychoanalytic theory. Claude Maisonnat provides fresh insight into the poetics of textuality by introducing the concept of textual voice, as opposed to the traditional conceptions of authorial voice and narrative voice. Understood as the main vector of poeticity in a text, textual voice is an offshoot of the Lacanian object-voice trimmed to fit a literary context. It enables the reader to uncover deeply concealed motivations and perceive unsuspected connections to the biographical background of the texts. At the same time, it offers new ways of structuring close reading and opens vistas into the mysteries of creation. Maisonnat gives insightful readings of Conrad’s best-known and less widely read works while developing a theoretically rich framework to tackle the notions of style and voice in literature.

This book is volume 26 of the series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives, edited by Wieslaw Krajka.

Claude Maisonnat is professor emeritus at the Université Lumière Lyon 2. He has published widely on Conrad’s works, including a book on Lord Jim.

Rebecca Rogers and Myriam Boussahba-Bravard (eds.), Women in International and Universal Exhibitions, 1876–1937

© 2018 – Routledge

286 pages | 17 B/W Illus.
ISBN: 1138636053

This book argues for the importance of bringing women and gender more directly into the dynamic field of exposition studies. Reclaiming women for the history of world fairs (1876-1937), it also seeks to introduce new voices into these studies, dialoguing across disciplinary and national historiographies.

From the outset, women participated not only as spectators, but also as artists, writers, educators, artisans and workers, without figuring among the organizers of international exhibitions until the 20th century. Their presence became more pointedly acknowledged as feminist movements developed within the Western World and specific spaces dedicated to women’s achievements emerged.

International exhibitions emerged as showcases of “modernity” and “progress,” but also as windows onto the foreign, the different, the unexpected and the spectacular. As public rituals of celebration, they transposed national ceremonies and protests onto an international stage. For spectators, exhibitions brought the world home; for organizers, the entire world was a fair.

Women were actors and writers of the fair narrative, although acknowledgment of their contribution was uneven and often ephemeral. Uncovering such silence highlights how gendered the triumphant history of modernity was, and reveals the ways women as a category engaged with modern life within that quintessential modern space—the world fair.

Rebecca Rogers is Professor in the History of Education at the Université Paris Descartes, France.

Myriam Boussahba-Bravard is Professor in British Civilization at the Université Paris Diderot, France.

Jean-Michel Ganteau, Christine Reynier and Isabelle Brasme (eds.), The Humble in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature and Arts

Description: Through its take on ‘the humble’, this volume attempts to reveal the depth and philosophical relevance of literature, its ethical and political dimension as well as its connection to life. Because it can be associated with social class, religion, psychology or ethics, the notion of ‘the humble’ lends itself to diverse types of studies. The papers collected in this volume argue that in the course of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, artists and writers have revisited the term ‘humble’ and, far from treating it as a simple motif, have raised it to the status of an aesthetic category. This category can first foster a better understanding of fiction, poetry, painting, and their representation of precarious lives through various genres and modes. It may also draw attention to neglected or depreciated humble novels or art forms that developed from the Victorian to the contemporary period, through the Edwardian and the modernist eras. Finally, it helps revise assumptions about the literature and art of the period and signals to a poetics of the humble. The works of art examined here explore the humble as a possible capacity and ethical force, a way of being and acting.

Contents:

Introduction: Isabelle Brasme, Jean-Michel Ganteau, Christine Reynier

Humble Art Forms

• Laurence Roussillon-Constant: Artful Humility: A Pre-Raphaelite Ideal?
• Sophie Aymes: Autographic Wood Engraving: Modernist D. I. Y.
• Claudia Tobin: ‘The Humbleness of all his Objects’: Cézanne, Still Life, and Modern Writers

Aestheticizing Religious Humility

• Stéphane Sitayeb: From Humbleness to Humiliation: Physical Losses and Spiritual Gains in The Hill of Dreams, by Arthur Machen
• Shirley Bricout: The Humble Touch of the Good Samaritan in D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod
• José Mari Yebra: The Humble Side of Motherhood in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary

Gendering the Humble

• Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz: The Humble, Gender and the Local in Recent British and Irish Narratives
• Susana Onega: Lesbian Invisibility and the Politics of Representation of the Lady and the Humble Servant in Sarah Waters’ Affinity

Precariousness

• Angela Locatelli: ‘The Humble/d’ in Literature and Philosophy: Precariousness, Vulnerability, and the Pragmatics of Social Visibility
• Corina Stan: A Ship of Fools: Precarious Lives in 1660s / 1980s England
• Silvia Pellicer-Orti : Writing and Loving: Strategies to Overcome Humbleness in Lynne Reid Banks’ Children at the Gate

Self-effacement

• Pascale Tollance:  From Humiliation to Humility: Swift’s Aesth/et(h)ics of Self-Effacement in The Light of Day
• Xavier LeBrun: Leaving Jacob Room: Narratorial Humility in Jacob’s Room
• Aude Haffen: “In a tactful, impersonal way, we have become quite intimate”: Christopher Isherwood’s Humble Persona and Inoperative Narratives in Goodbye to Berlin (1939)
• Adeline Arniac: ‘We can’t start again. We can end again.’ Humble Inchoation in a Selection from Harold Pinter’s Memory Plays

The British Humble Abroad 

• Leila Haghshenas: The Aesthetics of Humility in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle
• Laurent Mellet: The British Humble Abroad: Humanism in Practice in E. M. Forster’s First Novel (Where Angels Fear to Tread) and Jonathan Coe’s Latest (Expo 58)

Further details: https://www.pulm.fr/index.php/9782367812489.html

Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, ed. Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès Lafont & Charlotte Coffin

Manchester University Press, 2017

304 pages, ISBN: 978-1-5261-1768-7

DESCRIPTION: This volume proposes new insights into the uses of classical mythology by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, focusing on interweaving processes in early modern appropriations of myth. Its 11 essays show how early modern writing intertwines diverse myths and plays with variant versions of individual myths that derive from multiple classical sources, as well as medieval, Tudor and early modern retellings and translations. Works discussed include poems and plays by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and others. Essays concentrate on specific plays including The Merchant of Venice and Dido, Queen of Carthage, tracing interactions between myths, chronicles, the Bible and contemporary genres. Mythological figures are considered to demonstrate how the weaving together of sources deconstructs gendered representations. New meanings emerge from these readings, which open up methodological perspectives on multi-textuality, artistic appropriation and cultural hybridity/

Contents

Introduction: ‘Ariachne’s broken woof’ – Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès Lafont and Charlotte Coffin

1. Shakespeare’s mythological feuilletage: A methodological induction – Yves Peyré
2. The non-Ovidian Elizabethan epyllion: Thomas Watson, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield – Tania Demetriou
3. This realm is an empire’: Tales of origins in medieval and early modern France and England – Dominique Goy-Blanquet
4. Trojan shadows in Shakespeare’s King John – Janice Valls-Russell
5. Venetian Jasons, parti-coloured lambs and a tainted wether: Ovine tropes and the Golden Fleece in The Merchant of Venice – Atsuhiko Hirota
6. Fifty ways to kill your brother: Medea and the poetics of fratricide in early modern English literature – Katherine Heavey
7. ‘She, whom Jove transported into Crete’: Europa, between consent and rape – Gaëlle Ginestet
8. Subtle weavers, mythological interweavings and feminine political agency: Penelope and Arachne in early modern drama – Nathalie Rivère de Carles
9. Multi-layered conversations in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage – Agnès Lafont
10. Burlesque or neoplatonic? Popular or elite? The shifting value of classical mythology in Love’s Mistress– Charlotte Coffin
11. Pygmalion, once and future myth: Instead of a conclusion – Ruth Morse

Index

Details: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526117687/

Editors

• Janice Valls-Russell is employed by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, France, where she coordinates early modern research projects
• Agnès Lafont is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France
• Charlotte Coffin is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne, France

Empires and Revolutions: Cunninghame Graham and his Contemporaries, edited by Carla Sassi and Silke Stroh

Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, August 2017

ISBN 978-1-908980-25-0

192 pages
Paperback
£ 12.95  /  € 17.95  /  $ 19.95

The European age of empires launched a process of capitalist globalisation that continues to the present day. It is also inextricably linked with the spread of revolutionary discourses, in terms of race, nation, or social class: the quest for emancipation, political independence, and economic equality. Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852–1936), in both his life and his oeuvre, most effectively represents the complex interaction between imperial and revolutionary discourses in this dramatic period. Throughout his life he was an outspoken critic of injustice and inequality, and his appreciation of the demands and customs of diverse territories and contrasting cultures were hallmarks of his life, his political ideas, and his writing. These essays explore the expression of these ideas in the works of Cunninghame Graham and of other Scottish writers of the period.

Contents

• Introduction (by Carla Sassi & Silke Stroh)
• Chapter 1: R. B. Cunninghame Graham: Janiform Genius (by Cedric Watts)
• Chapter 2: The Local and the Global: The Multiple Contexts of Cunninghame Graham
  (by John M. MacKenzie)
• Chapter 3: Anti-Slavery Discourse in Three Adventure Stories by R. M. Ballantyne
  (by Jochen Petzold)
• Chapter 4: Don Roberto on Doughty Deeds; or, Slavery and Family History in the Scottish Renaissance
  (by Michael Morris)
• Chapter 5: Empire and Globalisation in John Francis Campbell’s My Circular Notes
  (by Jessica Homberg-Schramm)
• Chapter 6: Nineteenth-Century Argentine Literature and the Writings of R. B. Cunninghame Graham
  (by Richard Niland)
• Chapter 7: R. B. Cunninghame Graham and the Argentinean Angelito (by Jennifer Hayward)
• Chapter 8: Opposing Racism and Imperialism: Isabella Fyvie Mayo’s search for literary space(s), 1880–1914 (by Lindy Moore)
• Chapter 9: The Empire in Cunninghame Graham’s Parliamentary Speeches and Early Writings, 1885–1900 (by Lachlan Munro)
• Chapter 10: White-Skinned Barbarians in Selected Tales by R. B. Cunninghame Graham
  (by John C. McIntyre)
• Chapter 11: Violet Jacob on Capital Relation: Local and Global Flows of Privilege and (Im)mobility
  (by Arianna Introna)

Editors

• Carla Sassi is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Verona
• Silke Stroh is a lecturer in anglophone literature and cultural studies at Muenster University, Germany

Online information

http://asls.arts.gla.ac.uk/Empires_and_Revolutions.html

Hubert Zapf (ed.), Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology

HEAS Volume 2

2016, 725 pages
Special Offer of €49,95 (regular price € 199,95)

Ecocriticism has emerged as one of the most fascinating and rapidly growing fields of recent literary and cultural studies. From its regional origins in late-twentieth-century Anglo-American academia, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, which involves a decidedly transdisciplinary and transnational paradigm that promises to return a new sense of relevance to research and teaching in the humanities. A distinctive feature of the present handbook in comparison with other survey volumes is the combination of ecocriticism with cultural ecology, reflecting an emphasis on the cultural transformation of ecological processes and on the crucial role of literature, art, and other forms of cultural creativity for the evolution of societies towards sustainable futures. In state-of-the-art contributions by leading international scholars in the field, this handbook maps some of the most important developments in contemporary ecocritical thought. It introduces key theoretical concepts, issues, and directions of ecocriticism and cultural ecology and demonstrates their relevance for the analysis of texts and other cultural phenomena.

This is a special paperback offer for individual members of the ESSE, only. Valid until 15.10.2017.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/r8lz1ynkm7plg5z/HEAS%20PB%20FLYER_ESSE.pdf?dl=0

Gabriele Rippl (ed.), Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound – Music

HEAS Volume 1

2015, 701 pages
Special Offer €49,95 (regular price €199,95)

This handbook offers students and researchers compact orientation in their study of intermedial phenomena in Anglophone literary texts and cultures by introducing them to current academic debates, theoretical concepts and methodologies. By combining theory with text analysis and contextual anchoring, it introduces students and scholars alike to a vast field of research which encompasses concepts such as intermediality, multi- and plurimediality, intermedial reference, transmediality, ekphrasis, as well as related concepts such as visual culture, remediation, adaptation, and multimodality, which are all discussed in connection with literary examples. Hence each of the 30 contributions spans both a theoretical approach and concrete analysis of literary texts from different centuries and different Anglophone cultures.

This is a special paperback offer for individual members of the ESSE, only. Valid until 15.10.2017.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/r8lz1ynkm7plg5z/HEAS%20PB%20FLYER_ESSE.pdf?dl=0

Laurent Curelly, An Anatomy of an English Radical Newspaper: The Moderate (1648-9)

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017

280 pages

This book explores the content of The Moderate, a radical newspaper of the British Civil Wars published in the pivotal years 1648-9. This newsbook, as newspapers were then known, is commonly associated with the Leveller movement, a radical political group that promoted a democratic form of government. While valuable studies have been published on the history of seventeenth-century English periodicals, as well as on the interaction between these newspapers and print culture at large, very little has been written on individual newspapers. This book fills a void: it provides an in-depth investigation of the news printed in The Moderate, with reference to other newspapers and to the larger historical context, and captures the essence of this periodical, seen both as a political publication and a commercial product. This book will be of interest to early-modern historians and literary scholars.

The Cambridge Scholars Publishing website makes it possible to view the first thirty pages of the book:
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/an-anatomy-of-an-english-radical-newspaper

Spectacular Science, Technology and Superstition in the Age of Shakespeare, Sophie Chiari and Mickaël Popelard (eds.)

Edinburgh University Press, 2017

288 pages. ISBN (Hardback) : 9781474427814

Editors:

• Sophie Chiari, Professor at Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France.
• Mickaël Popelard, Associate Professor at Université de Basse-Normandie, Caen, France.

The volume explores the interaction between science, literature and spectacle in Shakespeare’s era.

To the readers who ask themselves: ‘What is science?’, this volume provides an answer from an early modern perspective, whereby science included such various intellectual pursuits as history, poetry, occultism and philosophy. By exploring particular aspects of Shakespearean drama, this collection illustrates how literature and science were inextricably linked in the early modern period. In order to bridge the gap between Renaissance literature and early modern science, the essays collected here focus on a complex intellectual territory situated at the point of juncture between humanism, natural magic and craftsmanship. It is argued that science and literature constantly interacted, thus revealing that what we now call ‘literature’ and what we choose to describe as ‘science’ were not clear-cut categories in Shakespeare’s days but rather a part of common intellectual territory.

Key Features

• Analyses different aspects of Shakespeare’s plays through the prism of early modern science
• Sheds fresh light on major works such as the Sonnets, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale
• Combines theoretical views, historical approaches, and close readings
• Offers an innovative dialectic vision of the Shakespeare/science nexus, taking up Mazzio’s seminal idea that it is now necessary to “move beyond forms of analysis focused largely on thematic traces of, or indeed linguistic reflections of, historically specific arenas of scientific practice”
• Links science and spectacle and posits that early modern theatre fashioned the reception of early modern discoveries
• Pays attention to systems of thought which bind together scientific and literary discourses, practices and mentalities within a single episteme (in Michel Foucault’s interpretation of the word)