Representing Rape in the English Early Modern Period


Book Description

A study of the impossibilities of adequately representing rape from the victim's perspective in the early modern period. It considers a variety of materials - verse narratives, plays, paintings and prints -showing how genre and form inflect the representation without altering the bias pattern.




Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature


Book Description

In thirteen studies of representations of rape in Medieval and Early Modern literature by such authors as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Spenser, this volume argues that some form of sexual violence against women serves as a foundation of Western culture. The volume has two purposes: first, to explore the resistance these pervasive representations generate and have generated for readers - especially for the female reader- and second, to explore what these representations tell us about social formations governing the relationships between men and women. More particularly, Rose and Robertson are interested in how representations of rape manifest a given culture's understanding of the female subject in society.




Rape in Early Modern England


Book Description

This book is intended for those in the humanities seeking a legal context for writing about rape in early modern England. It takes the premise that over the past four decades misunderstandings about rape law, and misreadings of rape statutes from medieval to Elizabethan times, have become widely cited in criticism. Helen Barker identifies how this has arisen, and discusses the main sources of confusion – including indissoluble issues around the word ‘ravishment’. Rape law historically encompassed elopement and abduction; this book offers a succinct overview of the law, and draws attention to the wider social context other than gender opposition in which it is often presented. In addition, critics have been tempted to rely on the ostensibly authoritative seventeenth-century treatise, The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights, as a legal source. By examining the context of its publication, this book suggests that the treatise is unreliable and can mislead the unwary.




Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England


Book Description

The word 'rape' today denotes sexual appropriation; yet it originally signified the theft of a woman from her father or husband by abduction or elopement. In the early modern period, its meaning is in transition between these two senses, while rapes and attempted rapes proliferate in literature. This age also sees the emergence of the woman writer, despite a sexual ideology which equates women's writing with promiscuity. Classical myths, however, associate women's story-telling with resistance to rape. This comprehensive study of rape and representation considers a wide range of texts drawn from prose fiction, poetry and drama by male and female writers, both canonical and non-canonical. Combining close attention to detail with an overview of the period, it demonstrates how the representation of gender-relations has exploited the subject of rape, and uses its understanding of this phenomenon to illuminate the issues of sexual and discursive autonomy which figure largely in women's texts of the period.




Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England


Book Description

This volume brings together two vibrant areas of Renaissance studies today: memory and sexuality. The contributors show that not only Shakespeare but also a broad range of his contemporaries were deeply interested in how memory and sexuality interact. Are erotic experiences heightened or deflated by the presence of memory? Can a sexual act be commemorative? Can an act of memory be eroticized? How do forms of romantic desire underwrite forms of memory? To answer such questions, these authors examine drama, poetry, and prose from both major authors and lesser-studied figures in the canon of Renaissance literature. Alongside a number of insightful readings, they show that sonnets enact a sexual exchange of memory; that epics of nationhood cannot help but eroticize their subjects; that the act of sex in Renaissance tragedy too often depends upon violence of the past. Memory, these scholars propose, re-shapes the concerns of queer and sexuality studies – including the unhistorical, the experience of desire, and the limits of the body. So too does the erotic revise the dominant trends of memory studies, from the rhetoric of the medieval memory arts to the formation of collective pasts.




Rape and the Rise of the Author


Book Description

Contending that early modern fictional portrayals of sexual violence identify the position of the author with that of the chaste woman threatened with rape, Amy Greenstadt challenges the prevalent scholarly view that this period's concept of 'The Author' was inherently masculine. Instead, she argues, the analogy between rape and writing centrally informed ideas of literary intention that emerged during the English Renaissance. Analyzing works by Milton, Sidney, Shakespeare and Cavendish, Greenstadt shows how the figure of 'The Author' - and by extension ideas of the modern individual--derived from a paradigm of female virtue and vulnerability. This volume supplements the growing body of studies that address the relationship between early modern textual representation and notions of gender and sexuality; it also adds a new dimension in considering the wider origins of modern concepts of selfhood and individual rights.




Early Modern Trauma


Book Description

This edited collection explores what trauma—seen through an analytical lens—can reveal about the early modern period and, conversely, what conceptualizations of psychological trauma from the period can tell us about trauma theory itself.




Dismemberment in the Medieval and Early Modern English Imaginary


Book Description

The medieval and early modern English imaginary encompasses a broad range of negative and positive dismemberments, from the castration anxieties of Turk plays to the elite practices of distributive burial. This study argues that representations and instances of bodily fragmentation illustrated and performed acts of exclusion and inclusion, detaching not only limbs from bodies but individuals from identity groups. Within this context it examines questions of legitimate and illegitimate violence, showing that such distinctions largely rested upon particular acts’ assumed symbolic meanings. Specific chapters address ways dismemberments manifested gender, human versus animal nature, religious and ethnic identity, and social rank. The book concludes by examining the afterlives of body parts, including relics and specimens exhibited for entertainment and education, contextualized by discussion of the resurrection body and its promise of bodily reintegration. Grounded in dramatic works, the study also incorporates a variety of genres from midwifery manuals to broadside ballads.




Space, Place, and Gendered Violence in South African Writing


Book Description

Exploring the relationship between space, place, and gendered violence as depicted in a range of South African writing, Gunne examines the social and political conditions of exceptionality during and after apartheid. Writers covered include: Hilda Bernstein, J.M. Coetzee, Achmat Dangor, Ruth First, Nadine Gordimer, and Antjie Krog.




Interpersonal Violence


Book Description

From early modernity to today, society has encountered various forms of interpersonal violence. Through exploration of particular areas within Europe and Russia to Africa, America and Asia, this collection presents both differences and connections among various forms of interpersonal violence in different times, places, institutional orders and relationships. Interpersonal Violence introduces research results from studies in various disciplines, such as history, sociology, social policy social work, cultural studies, and gender studies. In focusing on the diverse and often ignored social locations and cultural backgrounds of interpersonal violence, the book demonstrates 1) how the specificity of temporality and spatiality affect the manifestation of violence, 2) how the dynamics of intersectional and institutional differences are located in social space and time, and 3) how the different forms of violence in different times are affectively, conceptually and discursively connected. With its comprehensive and integrative approach, this book is a key tool book for understanding the phenomenon and cultural conceptions of interpersonal violence. It would be most suitable for upper level undergraduates, graduates doctoral students interested in social sciences, history, criminology, psychology, cultural studies, education, gender studies and public health.