Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature & Culture) (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)

Cambridge University Press, 3/7/1996
EAN 9780521454711, ISBN10: 0521454719

Hardcover, 420 pages, 23.7 x 16 x 2.8 cm
Language: English

This collection of original essays brings together some of the most prominent figures in new historicist and cultural materialist approaches to the early modern period, and offers a new focus on the literature and culture of the Renaissance. Traditionally, Renaissance studies have concentrated on the human subject. The essays collected here bring objects - purses, clothes, tapestries, houses, maps, feathers, communion wafers, tools, pages, skulls - back into view. As a result, the much-vaunted early modern subject ceases to look autonomous and sovereign, but is instead caught up in a vast and uneven world of objects which he and she makes, owns, values, imagines, and represents. This book puts things back into relation with people; in the process, it elicits new critical readings, and new cultural configurations.

Introduction Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass
Part I. Priority of Objects
1. The ideology of superfluous things
King Lear as period piece Margreta de Grazia
2. Rude mechanicals Patricia Parker
3. Spenser's domestic domain
poetry property and the Early Modern subject Louis A. Montrose
Part II. Materialisations
4. Gendering the Crown Stephen Orgel
5. The unauthored 1539 volume in which is printed the Hecatomphile, The Flowers of French Poetry and Other Soothing Things Nancy J. Vickers
6. Dematerialisations
textile and textual properties in Ovid, Sandys, and Spenser Ann Rosalind Jones
Part III. Appropriations
7. Freedom service and the trade in slaves
the problem of labour in Paradise Lost Maureen Quilligan
8. Feathers and flies
Aphra Behn and the seventeenth-century trade in exotica Margaret W. Ferguson
9. Unlearning the Aztec Cantares (Preliminaries to a postcolonial history) Gary Tomlinson
Part IV. Fetishisms
10. Worn worlds
clothes and identity on the Renaissance stage Peter Stallybrass
11. The Countess of Pembroke's literal translation Jonathan Goldberg
12. Remnants of the sacred in early modern England Stephen Greenblatt
Part V. Objections
13. The insincerity of women Marjorie Garber
14. Desire is death Jonathan Dollimore
Index.