The Automaton In English Renaissance Literature

Author : Wendy Beth Hyman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2016-03-23
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781317040811

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The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature by Wendy Beth Hyman Pdf

The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature features original essays exploring the automaton-from animated statue to anthropomorphized machine-in the poetry, prose, and drama of England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Addressing the history and significance of the living machine in early modern literature, the collection places literary automata of the period within their larger aesthetic, historical, philosophical, and scientific contexts. While no single theory or perspective conscribes the volume, taken as a whole the collection helps correct an assumption that frequently emerges from a post-Enlightenment perspective: that these animated beings are by definition exemplars of the new science, or that they point necessarily to man's triumphant relationship to technology. On the contrary, automata in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem only partly and sporadically to function as embodiments of an emerging mechanistic or materialist worldview. Renaissance automata were just as likely not to confirm for viewers a hypothesis about the man-machine. Instead, these essays show, automata were often a source of wonder, suggestive of magic, proof of the uncannily animating effect of poetry-indeed, just as likely to unsettle the divide between man and divinity as that between man and matter.

Author : Wendy Beth Hyman
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : English literature
ISBN : 6613157961

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The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature by Wendy Beth Hyman Pdf

This volume features original essays exploring the automaton - from animated statue to anthropomorphized machine - in the poetry, prose, and drama of England in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Author : Wendy Beth Hyman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2016-03-23
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781317040804

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The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature by Wendy Beth Hyman Pdf

The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature features original essays exploring the automaton-from animated statue to anthropomorphized machine-in the poetry, prose, and drama of England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Addressing the history and significance of the living machine in early modern literature, the collection places literary automata of the period within their larger aesthetic, historical, philosophical, and scientific contexts. While no single theory or perspective conscribes the volume, taken as a whole the collection helps correct an assumption that frequently emerges from a post-Enlightenment perspective: that these animated beings are by definition exemplars of the new science, or that they point necessarily to man's triumphant relationship to technology. On the contrary, automata in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem only partly and sporadically to function as embodiments of an emerging mechanistic or materialist worldview. Renaissance automata were just as likely not to confirm for viewers a hypothesis about the man-machine. Instead, these essays show, automata were often a source of wonder, suggestive of magic, proof of the uncannily animating effect of poetry-indeed, just as likely to unsettle the divide between man and divinity as that between man and matter.

Author : Lynn M. Maxwell
Publisher : Springer
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2019-05-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783030169329

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Wax Impressions, Figures, and Forms in Early Modern Literature by Lynn M. Maxwell Pdf

This book explores the role of wax as an important conceptual material used to work out the nature and limits of the early modern human. By surveying the use of wax in early modern cultural spaces such as the stage and the artist’s studio and in literary and philosophical texts, including those by William Shakespeare, John Donne, René Descartes, Margaret Cavendish, and Edmund Spenser, this book shows that wax is a flexible material employed to define, explore, and problematize a wide variety of early modern relations including the relationship of man and God, man and woman, mind and the world, and man and machine.

Author : Robert DeMaria, Jr.,Heesok Chang,Samantha Zacher
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2013-12-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781118731833

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A Companion to British Literature, Volume 2 by Robert DeMaria, Jr.,Heesok Chang,Samantha Zacher Pdf

Author : Karl A.E. Enenkel,Walter Melion
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 613 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2020-12-29
Category : Art
ISBN : 9789004440401

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Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Place, 1500–1700 by Karl A.E. Enenkel,Walter Melion Pdf

This volume examines the image-based methods of interpretation that pictorial and literary landscapists employed between 1500 and 1700.

Author : Ronda Arab,Michelle Dowd,Adam Zucker
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2015-05-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317690696

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Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater by Ronda Arab,Michelle Dowd,Adam Zucker Pdf

This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays such as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday together with understudied texts such as court entertainments, and examining topics ranging from dramatic celebrity to women’s political agency to the parental emotion of grief, this volume provides a fresh and at times provocative assessment of the "historical affects"—financial, emotional, and socio-political—that transformed Renaissance theater. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive theoretical or philosophical contexts, the essays in this volume ask readers to consider how drama emplaces the most personal, unspeakable passions in matrices defined in part by financial exchange, by erotic desire, by gender, by the material body, and by theatricality itself. As it encourages this conversation to take place, the collection provides scholars and students alike with a series of new perspectives, not only on the plays, emotions, and histories discussed in its pages, but also on broader shifts and pressures animating literary studies today.

Author : Michael Slater
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 169 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2024-04-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781040013946

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Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution by Michael Slater Pdf

Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution: Forms of Proof argues that the rise of mechanical science in the seventeenth century had a profound impact on both language and literature. To the extent that new ideas about things were accompanied by new attitudes toward words, what we commonly regard as the “scientific revolution” inevitably bore literary dimensions as well. Literary tropes and forms underwent tremendous reassessment in the seventeenth century, and early modern science was shaped just as powerfully by contest over the place of literary figures, from personification and metaphor to anamorphosis and allegory. In their rejection of teleological explanations of natural motion, for instance, early modern philosophers often disputed the value of personification, a figural projection of interiority onto what was becoming increasingly a mechanical world. And allegory—a dominant mode of literature from the late Middle Ages until well into the Renaissance—became “the vice of those times,” as Thomas Rymer described it in 1674. This book shows that its acute devaluation was possible only in conjunction with a distinctively modern physics. Analyzing writings by Sidney, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, and more, it asserts that the scientific revolution was a literary phenomenon, just as the literary revolution was also a scientific one.

Author : Dr Leah Knight
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Page : 177 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2014-03-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781472406217

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Reading Green in Early Modern England by Dr Leah Knight Pdf

Green in early modern England did not mean what it does today; but what did it mean? Unveiling various versions and interpretations of green, this book offers a cultural history of a color that illuminates the distinctive valences greenness possessed in early modern culture. While treating green as a panacea for anything from sore eyes to sick minds, early moderns also perceived verdure as responsive to their verse, sympathetic to their sufferings, and endowed with surprising powers of animation. Author Leah Knight explores the physical and figurative potentials of green as they were understood in Renaissance England, including some that foreshadow our paradoxical dependence on and sacrifice of the green world. Ranging across contexts from early modern optics and olfaction to horticulture and herbal health care, this study explores a host of human encounters with the green world: both the impressions we make upon it and those it leaves with us. The first two chapters consider the value placed on two ways of taking green into early modern bodies and minds-by seeing it and breathing it in-while the next two address the manipulation of greenery by Orphic poets and medicinal herbalists as well as grafters and graffiti artists. A final chapter suggests that early modern modes of treating green wounds might point toward a new kind of intertextual ecology of reading and writing. Reading Green in Early Modern England mines many pages from the period - not literally but tropically, metaphorically green - that cultivate a variety of unexpected meanings of green and the atmosphere and powers it exuded in the early modern world.

Author : Catherine Nicholson
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2020-05-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780691201597

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Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene by Catherine Nicholson Pdf

The four-hundred-year story of readers' struggles with a famously unreadable poem—and what they reveal about the history of reading and the future of literary studies "I am now in the country, and reading in Spencer's fairy-queen. Pray what is the matter with me?" The plaint of an anonymous reader in 1712 sounds with endearing frankness a note of consternation that resonates throughout The Faerie Queene's reception history, from its first known reader, Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey, who urged him to write anything else instead, to Virginia Woolf, who insisted that if one wants to like the poem, "the first essential is, of course, not to read" it. For more than four centuries critics have sought to counter this strain of readerly resistance, but rather than trying to remedy the frustrations and failures of Spenser's readers, Catherine Nicholson cherishes them as a sensitive barometer of shifts in the culture of reading itself. Indeed, tracking the poem's mixed fortunes in the hands of its bored, baffled, outraged, intoxicated, obsessive, and exhausted readers turns out to be an excellent way of rethinking the past and future prospects of literary study. By examining the responses of readers from Queen Elizabeth and the keepers of Renaissance commonplace books to nineteenth-century undergraduates, Victorian children, and modern scholars, this book offers a compelling new interpretation of the poem and an important new perspective on what it means to read, or not to read, a work of literature.

Author : Signe Cohen
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2024-02-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781438496634

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I, Yantra by Signe Cohen Pdf

What does it mean to be human? I, Yantra examines ancient Indian narratives about robots and mechanically constructed beings to explore how their Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist authors approached this question. Making translations of many of these texts available in English for the first time, author Signe Cohen argues that they shed considerable light on South Asian religious notions of humanity, self, and agency. She also documents connections between ancient and modern responses to the ethical problems of what precisely constitutes a sentient being and what rights such a being should have. Situated at the intersection of humanities and bioethics, this cross-disciplinary study will be of interest to scholars of South Asian languages and literature as well as specialists in religion and technology.

Author : James Dougal Fleming
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2024-06-14
Category : History
ISBN : 9781040047323

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Timothie Bright and the Origins of Early Modern Shorthand by James Dougal Fleming Pdf

In Timothie Bright and the Origins of Early Modern Shorthand, J.D. Fleming brings together two areas of sixteenth-century intellectual history. One is the period emergence of artificial systems for verbatim shorthand notation—a crucial episode in the history of information. The other is the ancient medical discourse of melancholy humour, or black bile. Timothie Bright (1550–1615), physician and priest, prompts the juxtaposition. For he was the author, not only of the period’s original shorthand manual—Characterie (1588)—but also of the first book in English on the dark humour: The Treatise of Melancholy (1586). Bright’s account of melancholy involves a cybernetic phenomenology of the human. Essentially, we are psyches (souls or minds). We are sealed off from our bodies, operating them as automata across an interface. Psychological presence, for Bright, is illusion and pathology. Engrossing performances or representations therefore bring great danger, and so does the doctrine of predestination—less for its content than its typical delivery. Painful preaching was indispensable in sixteenth-century English Protestantism. But it falls foul of Bright’s proscriptions. These are followed by his publication of the first known system for verbatim shorthand notation since antiquity, its technique heavily inflected toward a vocabulary of the pulpit. The passionate, oral performance of the inspired preacher receives an unprecedented textual preservative—and prophylactic. Bright’s technology of information serves his phenomenology of alienation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the early modern period, the tradition of melancholy, and the history of information—as theory, and technology.

Author : David Marno
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2016-12-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780226415970

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Death Be Not Proud by David Marno Pdf

What might contemporary thinkers learn from prayer? The seventeenth-century French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche suggested a possibility: that prayer teaches us how to attend. This book explores the precedents of Malebranche s advice by reading John Donne s poetic prayers in the context of what David Marno calls the art of holy attention. This requires an understanding of attention s role in Christian devotion, which he provides by uncovering a tradition of holy attention that spans from ascetic thinkers and Church Fathers to Catholic spiritual exercises and Protestant prayer manuals. Donne s devotional poems occupy a unique position in this tradition. Marno identifies in them a devotional model of thinking whose aim is to experience an affect of attention. Marno s argument is framed by compelling close readings of Death, be not proud, Donne s most triumphant poem about the resurrection. Elsewhere, Marno takes up Claudius s prayer in "Hamlet" and Saint Augustine s account of attention in the "Soliloquies" and the "Confessions." The book ends with a Coda on the aftermath of holy attention in the philosophies of Descartes and Malebranche."

Author : Nicholas van Orden
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2019-01-04
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781848881631

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Navigating Cybercultures by Nicholas van Orden Pdf

The papers collected here address the questions about posthumanism, hybridity, humanity, subjectivity, and aesthetics that echo through all of our daily attempts to navigate our rapidly shifting cybercultures.

Author : Jennifer C. Vaught
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2019-09-23
Category : History
ISBN : 9781501513152

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Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser by Jennifer C. Vaught Pdf

Jennifer C. Vaught illustrates how architectural rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser provides a bridge between the human body and mind and the nonhuman world of stone and timber. The recurring figure of the body as a besieged castle in Shakespeare’s drama and Spenser’s allegory reveals that their works are mutually based on medieval architectural allegories exemplified by the morality play The Castle of Perseverance. Intertextual and analogous connections between the generically hybrid works of Shakespeare and Spenser demonstrate how they conceived of individuals not in isolation from the physical environment but in profound relation to it. This book approaches the interlacing of identity and place in terms of ecocriticism, posthumanism, cognitive theory, and Cicero’s art of memory. Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser examines figures of the permeable body as a fortified, yet vulnerable structure in Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, and Sonnets and in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Complaints.