Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature PDF Download

Author: Linda Woodbridge
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252026331
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Woodbridge shows that the prevailing image of the vagrant poor in Renaissance England--sturdy, comical, resourceful rogues who were adept at living on the fringes of society--was essentially a literary fabrication pressed into the service of specific social and political agendas.

Author: Su Fang Ng
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1644532409
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
England's Asian Renaissance examines the often-subtle ways in which Asian cultures inflected the literature of early modern England, with an eye toward patterns of cross-cultural fertilization, mediation, and convergence. The collection moves away from hegemonic narratives of English cultural and political sovereignty to underscore the radically mobile nature of early modern culture.

Author: David Coleman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317069188
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Region, Religion and English Renaissance Literature brings together leading scholars of early modern literature and culture to explicate the ways in which both regional and religious contexts inform the production, circulation and interpretation of Renaissance literary texts. Examining texts by a wide variety of early modern writers - including Edmund Spenser, Lodowick Lloyd, Richard Nugent, Thomas Middleton and John Webster, Richard Montagu, and John Milton - the contributors to this volume enhance our understanding of the complex cultural contexts of early modern Anglophone writing.

Author: Neil Larry Shumsky
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313377014
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
This book presents an unflinching investigation of homelessness in the United States—a problem that has been with us since the arrival of the first English settlers nearly 400 years ago. The terms historically used to describe them include "bums," "hoboes," "migrants," "street people," "transients," "tramps," and "vagrants." Just as varied as the words we have used to describe them are the reasons many people have found themselves living in the land of opportunity without permanent residence. The book considers homelessness and its distinctive character in three periods of American history: the era of tramps and hoboes in the late 1800s–early 1900s, the era of transients and migrants in the 1930s, and the era of homeless and "street" people in the last 40 years. It clarifies the multiple meanings of the word "homeless" today and demonstrates that homelessness is a symptom of more than one problem, leading to confusion about the issue of homelessness and hampering attempts to reduce its occurrence. Author Neil Larry Shumsky, PhD, also postulates that the treatment of homelessness in England before the colonization of North America laid the foundation of pervasive American attitudes and practices.

Author: Sal Nicolazzo
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300255705
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
How vagrancy, as legal and imaginative category, shaped the role of policing in colonialism, racial formation, and resource distributionIn this innovative book demonstrating the important role of eighteenth-century literary treatments of policing and vagrancy, Nicolazzo offers a prehistory of police legitimacy in a period that predates the establishment of the modern police force. She argues that narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices shaped not only police and legal activity of the period, but also public conceptions of police power. Her extensive research delves into law and literature on both sides of the Atlantic, tracking the centrality of vagrancy in establishing police power as a form of sovereignty crucial to settler colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. The first book in several generations to address policing and vagrancy in the eighteenth century, and the first in the field to center race and empire in its account of literary vagrancy, Nicolazzo’s work is a significant contribution to the field of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies.

Author: Craig Dionne
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472025163
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
"Those at the periphery of society often figure obsessively for those at its center, and never more so than with the rogues of early modern England. Whether as social fact or literary fiction-or both, simultaneously-the marginal rogue became ideologically central and has remained so for historians, cultural critics, and literary critics alike. In this collection, early modern rogues represent the range, diversity, and tensions within early modern scholarship, making this quite simply the best overview of their significance then and now." -Jonathan Dollimore, York University "Rogues and Early Modern English Culture is an up-to-date and suggestive collection on a subject that all scholars of the early modern period have encountered but few have studied in the range and depth represented here." -Lawrence Manley, Yale University "A model of cross-disciplinary exchange, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture foregrounds the figure of the rogue in a nexus of early modern cultural inscriptions that reveals the provocation a seemingly marginal figure offers to authorities and various forms of authoritative understanding, then and now. The new and recent work gathered here is an exciting contribution to early modern studies, for both scholars and students." -Alexandra W. Halasz, Dartmouth College Rogues and Early Modern English Culture is a definitive collection of critical essays on the literary and cultural impact of the early modern rogue. Under various names-rogues, vagrants, molls, doxies, vagabonds, cony-catchers, masterless men, caterpillars of the commonwealth-this group of marginal figures, poor men and women with no clear social place or identity, exploded onto the scene in sixteenth-century English history and culture. Early modern representations of the rogue or moll in pamphlets, plays, poems, ballads, historical records, and the infamous Tudor Poor Laws treated these characters as harbingers of emerging social, economic, and cultural changes. Images of the early modern rogue reflected historical developments but also created cultural icons for mobility, change, and social adaptation. The underclass rogue in many ways inverts the familiar image of the self-fashioned gentleman, traditionally seen as the literary focus and exemplar of the age, but the two characters have more in common than courtiers or humanists would have admitted. Both relied on linguistic prowess and social dexterity to manage their careers, whether exploiting the politics of privilege at court or surviving by their wits on urban streets. Deftly edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, this anthology features essays from prominent and emerging critics in the field of Renaissance studies and promises to attract considerable attention from a broad range of readers and scholars in literary studies and social history.

Author: Elizabeth Rivlin
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810127814
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
In The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England, Elizabeth Rivlin explores the ways in which servant-master relationships reshaped literature. The early modern servant is enjoined to obey his or her master out of dutiful love, but the servant's duty actually amounts to standing in for the master, a move that opens the possibility of becoming master. Rivlin shows that service is fundamentally a representational practice, in which the servant who acts for a master merges with the servant who acts as a master. Rivlin argues that in the early modern period, servants found new positions as subjects and authors found new forms of literature. Representations of servants and masters became a site of contact between pressing material concerns and evolving aesthetic ones. Offering readings of dramas by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Thomas Dekker and prose fictions by Thomas Deloney and Thomas Nashe, Rivlin suggests that these authors discovered their own exciting and unstable projects in the servants they created.

Author: Leeds Barroll
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 0838639992
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Shakespeare Studies, edited by Leeds Barroll, a Scholar in Residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library, is an international volume published every year in hardcover, containing essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from both hemispheres. It includes substantial reviews of significant books and essays dealing with the cultural history of early modern England, as well as the place of Shakespeare's productions--and those of his contemporaries--within it. Volume XXXI presents a new feature, the first in an annual series of articles on "Early Modern Drama around the World." Specialists in each national drama being presented in other areas of the globe during the time of Shakespeare will discuss the state of scholarly study in each area. In this volume Grant Shen discusses late Ming drama in China, and Richard Pym writes on drama in Golden Age Spain. Full-length articles by Gustave Ungerer, Patricia Parker, Thomas Moisan, and Jennifer Lewin deal with The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Much Ado about Nothing, and Shakespeare's final plays. These are supplemented by review-articles by Raphael Falco and David Harris Sacks: "Is the Renaissance an Aesthetic Category?" and "Imagination in History." Volume XXXI also includes twenty-one reviews of books written by distinguished scholars on topics such as witchcraft, vagrancy, public devotion in early modern England, as well as on editions of the collected works of Elizabeth I.

Author: Sarah Houghton-Walker
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191030163
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In early eighteenth-century texts, the gypsy is frequently figured as an amusing rogue; by the Victorian period, it has begun to take on a nostalgic, romanticized form, abandoning sublimity in favour of the bucolic fantasy propagated by George Borrow and the founding members of the Gypsy Lore Society. Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period argues that, in the gap between these two situations, the figure of the gypsy is exploited by Romantic-period writers and artists, often in unexpected ways. Drawing attention to prominent writers (including Wordsworth, Austen, Clare, Cowper and Brontë) as well as those less well-known, Sarah Houghton-Walker examines representations of gypsies in literature and art from 1780-1830, alongside the contemporary socio-historical events and cultural processes which put pressure on those representations. She argues that, raising troubling questions by its repeated escape from the categories of enlightenment discourses which might seek to 'know' or 'understand' in empirical ways, the gypsy exists both within and outside of conventional English society. The figure of the gypsy is thus available to writers and artists to facilitate the articulation of dilemmas and anxieties taking various forms, and especially as a lens through which questions of knowledge and identity (which is often mutable, and troubling) might be focussed. .

Author: Emily L. King
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501739670
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
What is revenge, and what purpose does it serve? On the early modern English stage, depictions of violence and carnage—the duel between Hamlet and Laertes that leaves nearly everyone dead or the ghastly meal of human remains served at the end of Titus Andronicus—emphasize arresting acts of revenge that upset the social order. Yet the subsequent critical focus on a narrow selection of often bloody "revenge plays" has overshadowed subtler and less spectacular modes of vengeance present in early modern culture. In Civil Vengeance, Emily L. King offers a new way of understanding early modern revenge in relation to civility and community. Rather than relegating vengeance to the social periphery, she uncovers how facets of society—church, law, and education—relied on the dynamic of retribution to augment their power such that revenge emerges as an extension of civility. To revise the lineage of revenge literature in early modern England, King rereads familiar revenge tragedies (including Marston's Antonio's Revenge and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy) alongside a new archive that includes conduct manuals, legal and political documents, and sermons. Shifting attention from episodic revenge to quotidian forms, Civil Vengeance provides new insights into the manner by which retaliation informs identity formation, interpersonal relationships, and the construction of the social body.