Representing the Plague in Early Modern England

Herausgeber: Gilman, Ernest B.; Totaro, Rebecca

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

This collection offers readers a timely encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early modern writers transformed the plague into literature. The essays examine the impact of the plague on health, politics, and religion as well as on the plays, prose fiction, and plague bills that stand as witnesses to the experience of a society devastated by contagious disease. Readers will find physicians and moralists wrestling with the mysteries of the disease; erotic escapades staged in plague-time plays; the poignant prose works of William Bullein and Thomas Dekker; the bodies of monarchs who sought to protect themselves from plague; the chameleon-like nature of the plague as literal disease and as metaphor; and future strains of plague, literary and otherwise, which we may face in the globally-minded, technology-dependent, and ecologically-awakened twenty-first century. The bubonic plague compelled change in all aspects of lived experience in Early Modern England, but at the same time, it opened space for writers to explore new ideas and new literary forms-not all of them somber or horrifying and some of them downright hilarious. By representing the plague for their audiences, these writers made an epidemic calamity intelligible: for them, the dreaded disease could signify despair but also hope, bewilderment but also a divine plan, quarantine but also liberty, death but also new life.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Routledge
• Seitenzahl: 270
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. April 2012
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 15mm
• Gewicht: 396g
• ISBN-13: 9780415634182
• ISBN-10: 0415634180
• Artikelnr.: 53917904

Autorenporträt

Rebecca Totaro is Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University. She is the author of Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton. Ernest Gilman is Professor of English at NYU. He is the author of Plague Writing in Early Modern England.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments Introduction
Rebecca Totaro Section One: Making the Plague Serve Form and Function
1563-1666 1: Writing the Plague in English Prose Satire
William Kerwin 2: Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama
1604
Kelly J. Stage 3: Physical and Spiritual Illness: Narrative Appropriations of the Bills of Mortality
Erin Sullivan Section Two: Governing Bodies in Plague-Time 4: Contagious Figurations: Plague and the Impenetrable Nation after the Death of Elizabeth
Richelle Munkhoff 5: "Thinking to pass unknown": Measure for Measure
the Plague
and the Accession of James I
James D. Mardock Section Three: Performances
Playhouses
and the Sites of Re-Creation 6: "Sweet recreation barred": The Case for Playgoing in Plague-time
Nichole DeWall 7: Shakespeare's Dual Lexicons of Plague: Infections in Speech and Space
Paula S. Berggren 8: "A plague on both your houses": Sites of Comfort and Terror in Early Modern Drama
Barbara H. Traister Section Four: Contemporary Turns 9: Plague in A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Girardian Reading of Bottom and Hippolyta
Matthew Thiele 10: Dekker's and Middleton's Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature
Charles Whitney Afterword: Plague and Metaphor
Ernest B. Gilman Notes on Contributors Index