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

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1137351047 ISBN 13: 9781137351043

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

“Volume II’s outliers make clear the most important point of contention in our return to theory: anti-dualism and what this means for human agency as well as for our understandings of the political and the economic, which also might be to say, of the historical. For this reason, all of us should read ... The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, Volume II.” (Sharon O’Dair, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 69, 2014)

"For a bracing survey of theoretical developments in the field something one would need if she or he had been absorbed in some particular project for five or ten years without minding the critical discourse of the moment nothing is more economical than the second volume of The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, edited by Paul Cefalu, Gary Kuchar, and Bryan Reynolds, the successor to a similar book edited by Cefalu and Reynolds in 2010. The challenge of such a collection, of course, is that the contributors must produce an essay of literary analysis while discussing the theory it adapts, without reifying the latter too much or lapsing into predictability (because after all, 'theory' in a title like this usually means 'theory with which the reader is already familiar'). I am glad to report that the thirteen chapters here mostly avoid these dangers, led by Julia Reinhard Lupton's luminous essay that brings 'affordance theory, scenography, and architecture and urbanism' into conversation with 'the spaces traveled and tested by Shakespearean drama' (p. 146) and Drew Daniel's turn to Empedocles as an alternative model to the Lucretian Renaissance described in much recent work." Roland Greene, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

About the Author:

Julian Yates, University of Delaware, USA Dan Mills, Clayton State University, USA Joseph Campana, Rice University, USA Ken Hiltner, University of California, USA Edward Geisweidt, University of New Haven, USA Douglas Trevor, University of Michigan, USA Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, USA Matthew J. Smith, Azusa Pacific University, USA James A. Knapp, Loyola University of Chicago, USA Christopher Stokes, National University of Ireland, Ireland James Kuzner, Brown University, USA Kenneth Graham, University of Waterloo, Canada Drew Daniel, The Johns Hopkins University, USA

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1137351047
• ISBN 13: 9781137351043
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 321
• Editor: Cefalu P., Kuchar G., Reynolds B.