The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, Volume II

by Reynolds, Bryan; Cefalu, Paul; Kuchar, Gary

• ISBN13: 9781137351043
• ISBN10: 1137351047
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-10-10
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Scholars and students interested in the use of current critical theories will find this collection of original essays indispensable. A companion volume to The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive, the essays in this volume are organized into four categories: posthumanism, ecocriticism, historical phenomenology, and historicism now. Original essays by leading early modern scholars not only provide valuable insights into leading theoretical interventions, but provide close readings of key early modern texts, including Shakespearean drama, the work of Philip Sidney, George Herbert and John Donne, John Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing-World, and the early modern reception of Empedocles in the work of Marlowe's Tamburlaine and others.

Author Biography

Paul Cefalu is Professor at the Department of English, Lafayette College, USA. His previous books include Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature (2005), Revisionist Shakespeare: Transitional Ideologies in Texts and Contexts (2004), and Contemporary Theory and Early Modern English Literature: Sublime Objects of Theology (2007); Paul has also co-edited with Bryan Reynolds, The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive (2010).
 
Gary Kuchar is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is the author of The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England (2008) and Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (2005).
 
Bryan Reynolds is Chancellor's Professor at UC Irvine, USA. He is the author of Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida (2009), Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (2006), Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (2003), and Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (2002).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Notes on the Contributors
Introduction
PART I: POSTHUMANISM
1. It's (for) you; or, the tele-t/r/opical post-human; Julian Yates
2. Margaret Cavendish and the Creation, Publishing, and Empowering of Subjectivity in the Blazing World; Dan Mills
3. The Bee and the Sovereign (II): Segments, Swarms, and the Early Modern Multitude, Joseph Campana
PART II: ECOCRITICISM
4. Early Modern Ecocriticism; Ken Hiltner
5. Horticulture of the Head: The Vegetable Life of Hair inEarly Modern English Thought; Edward Geisweidt
6. The Private Lives of Trees and Flowers; Douglas Trevor
PART III: HISTORICAL PHENOMENOLOGY
7. Shakespearean Softscapes: Hospitality, Phenomenology, Design; Julia Reinhard Lupton
8. Describing the Sense of Confession in Hamlet; Matthew J. Smith
9. '''Tis insensible, then?': Language and Action in 1 Henry IV'; James A. Knapp
10. ''We Prove Mysterious by This Love': John Donne and the Intimacy of Flesh; Christopher Stokes
PART IV: HISTORICISM NOW
11. Milton, Habermas, and the Dynamics of Debate; James Kuzner
12. 'Copious Measures': The Sidney Psalms and the Meaning of Abundance; Kenneth Graham
13. The Empedoclean Renaissance; Drew Daniel
Index