Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the RenaissanceMarjorie B. Garber When we speak of the English Renaissance, what is it that we are naming, what are we recognizing reborn? As the essays in this latest collection from the English Institute demonstrate, our basic notions of the period have themselves been reconceived. In Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce, seven critics defamiliarize the images of the Renaissance "to permit the repressed to return, to acknowledge the presence of the unassimilable ghost the mark of difference of an age that is at once self and 'other'." John Hollander discovers a "hidden undersong" in the Spenserian lyric, while Patricia Parker examines the question of feminine dominance and male resistance in the Bower of Bliss. Stephen Orgel and Steven Mullaney document the Renaissance encounter with the alien "other" in essays on The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice. Macbeth, in Janet Adelman's reading, encodes the fantasy of an absolute and destructive maternal figure. Marjorie Garber addresses the Shakespearean authorship controversy in the context of the subversive uncanniness of the texts themselves; Mary Nyquist discusses Milton's Eve, his divorce tracts, and the exegetical tradition as recently examined by feminist biblical scholars. Together, these essays explore Renaissance discourses of estrangement as strategies for the construction of the self and the world. |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 40
... World , death , and the world beyond the grave . Recent theorists have argued that apparently subversive gestures on the part of a text or a culture are actually moves by the dominant ideology to appropriate the activity of subversion ...
... World is regularly treated as an instance not of the lust of savages but of their edenic in- nocence ; and it helps to explain why Caliban is not only unrepentant for his attempt on Miranda , but incapable of seeing that there is any ...
... World na- tives is Montaigne's essay " On Cannibals . " We know that Shakespeare was familiar with this essay , because Gonzalo's imagined utopia in- cludes , almost verbatim , a passage from John Florio's translation of it . But ...
Contents
Lyric and Power in | 21 |
Shakespeare and the Cannibals | 40 |
Brothers and Others or the Art of Alienation | 67 |
Copyright | |
5 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance Marjorie Garber No preview available - 1987 |