Book Description
Sexual freedom and ideology explored in the works of seventeenth-century English literature.
Author : Warren Chernaik
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 14,7 MB
Release : 1995-03-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780521464970
Sexual freedom and ideology explored in the works of seventeenth-century English literature.
Author : Warren Chernaik
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 46,45 MB
Release : 2008-07-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780521069168
The pursuit of sexual freedom and its political, philosophical and practical implications are the themes of this wide-ranging new study of seventeenth-century literature. The author examines the writers of the later seventeenth century in their historical context, and focuses particularly on what happens when women, as well as men, desire sexual freedom. In a study of the writings of the Earl of Rochester, notorious for their sexual candor, and of Aphra Behn, most controversial woman of her day, the author explores the tensions inherent in the ideology of individual liberty in the conduct of sexual relations inside and outside marriage.
Author : Susan J. Owen
Publisher : Wiley-Blackwell
Page : 474 pages
File Size : 25,53 MB
Release : 2008-02-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781405176101
This Companion illustrates the vitality and diversity of dramatic work 1660 to 1710. Twenty-five essays by leading scholars in the field bring together the best recent insights into the full range of dramatic practice and innovation at the time. Introduces readers to the recent boom in scholarship that has revitalised Restoration drama Explores historical and cultural contexts, genres of Restoration drama, and key dramatists, among them Dryden and Behn
Author : Katherine M. Quinsey
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 357 pages
File Size : 32,65 MB
Release : 2021-03-17
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0813159997
This volume of twelve original essays is the first comprehensive study of feminist issues in Restoration drama. The late seventeenth century marks a pivotal era in the history of feminism, when Renaissance assumptions about gender and patriarchy were being directly challenged. For the first time, women appeared onstage as actresses, made their presence felt as spectators and patrons, and wrote a number of the plays produced in theaters. In an unusually direct and probing way, drama of the Restoration period raised radical questions about the place of women in the family and in society, and about the essential nature of men and women. The essays examine feminist issues from a variety of historical and theoretical approaches across a spectrum of plays—comedies, tragedies, tragicomedies, and heroic drama. By addressing the acute questions of gender raised in the drama, Broken Boundaries presents a vivid portrait of the uncertainties and changing perceptions in all areas of intellectual, political, and social life during the last decades of the seventeenth century.
Author : Peggy Thompson
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 203 pages
File Size : 20,65 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1611483727
Coyness and Crime examines the extraordinary focus on feminine coyness in forty English comedies by ten diverse playwrights of the late seventeenth-century. In contexts ranging from reaffirmations of church and king to emerging interests in liberty and novelty, these plays consistently reveal women caught in an ironic and nearly intractable convergence of objectification and culpability that allows them little innocent sexual agency; this is both the source and the legacy of coyness in Restoration comedy.
Author : Marianne Thormählen
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 38,3 MB
Release : 1993-06-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780521440424
A major new study of the notorious Restoration rake-poet, set in his intellectual context.
Author : Faramerz Dabhoiwala
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 513 pages
File Size : 46,90 MB
Release : 2012-05-01
Category : History
ISBN : 019993939X
A man admits that, when drunk, he tried to have sex with an eighteen-year-old girl; she is arrested and denies they had intercourse, but finally begs God's forgiveness. Then she is publicly hanged alongside her attacker. These events took place in 1644, in Boston, where today they would be viewed with horror. How--and when--did such a complete transformation of our culture's attitudes toward sex occur? In The Origins of Sex, Faramerz Dabhoiwala provides a landmark history, one that will revolutionize our understanding of the origins of sexuality in modern Western culture. For millennia, sex had been strictly regulated by the Church, the state, and society, who vigorously and brutally attempted to punish any sex outside of marriage. But by 1800, everything had changed. Drawing on vast research--from canon law to court cases, from novels to pornography, not to mention the diaries and letters of people great and ordinary--Dabhoiwala shows how this dramatic change came about, tracing the interplay of intellectual trends, religious and cultural shifts, and politics and demographics. The Enlightenment led to the presumption that sex was a private matter; that morality could not be imposed; that men, not women, were the more lustful gender. Moreover, the rise of cities eroded community-based moral policing, and religious divisions undermined both church authority and fear of divine punishment. Sex became a central topic in poetry, drama, and fiction; diarists such as Samuel Pepys obsessed over it. In the 1700s, it became possible for a Church of Scotland leader to commend complete sexual liberty for both men and women. Arguing that the sexual revolution that really counted occurred long before the cultural movement of the 1960s, Dabhoiwala offers readers an engaging and wholly original look at the Western world's relationship to sex. Deeply researched and powerfully argued, The Origins of Sex is a major work of history.
Author : Janice Valls-Russell
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 488 pages
File Size : 29,12 MB
Release : 2024-10-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1350125881
Why does Bassanio compare himself to Jason? What is Hecuba to Hamlet? Is the mechanicals' staging of the Pyramus and Thisbe story funny or sad? This dictionary elucidates Shakespeare's use of mythological references in an early modern context, while bringing them to life for today's audiences and readers, at a time of renewed critical interest in the reception of the classics and fascination with classical mythology in popular culture. It is also a precious tool for practitioners who may not always know quite what to make of mythological references. Mythological figures, creatures, places and stories crowd Shakespeare's plays and poems, featuring as allusions, poetic analogies, inset shows, scene settings and characters or plots in their own right. Most of these references were familiar to Shakespeare's spectators and readers, who knew them from the writings of Ovid, Virgil and other classical authors, or indirectly through translations, commentaries, ballads and iconography. This dictionary illustrates how, far from being isolated, a mythological reference may resonate with the poetics of the text and its structure, cast light on characters and contexts, and may therefore be worth exploring onstage in a variety of ways. The 200 headings correspond to words and names actually used by Shakespeare: individual figures (Dido, Venus, Hercules), categories (Amazons, Centaurs, nymphs, satyrs), places (Colchos, Troy). Medium and longer entries also cover early modern usage and critical analysis in a cross-disciplinary approach that includes reception, textual, performance, gender and political studies.
Author : Paola Partenza
Publisher : V&R Unipress
Page : 143 pages
File Size : 10,74 MB
Release : 2018-05-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3847008528
Within art, society, culture, philosophy, literature and many other spheres, a constant issue being dealt with is that of sin. Reevaluation of this concept has proceeded down varied stimulating paths in relation to the multidisciplinary appraisal, although philosophical aesthetic and epistemic emphases commonly reflect issues present in literature. In certain instances, texts clearly refer to sin, while in other it is more of an ambiguous and obscured notion. Alongside the established understanding of sin, discourse, poetry and novels have responded to sin variously, due to the blossoming of ideas. French, American and British literature's responses to the notion of sin will be investigated through the academic studies included in this volume.
Author : D. Hughes
Publisher : Springer
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 32,28 MB
Release : 2001-02-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 023059770X
During the nineteen years of her play-writing career, Aphra Behn had far more new plays staged than anyone else. This book is the first to examine all her theatrical work. It explains her often dominant place in the complex theatrical culture of Charles II's reign, her divided political sympathies, and her interests as a free-thinking intellectual. It also reveals her as a brilliant theatrical practitioner, who used the seen as richly and significantly as the spoken.