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. |
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... called " the techniques of the subject . " The general term cultural pro- duction , used by New Historicist scholars to describe the complex in- teraction of Renaissance literary , historical , economic , and aesthetic or artistic texts ...
... called the genealogy of the modern subject . The internal distantiation ex- perienced by Frobisher's Eskimo creates a theater of and within the self , in which he views himself through the eyes of a judgmental and superior Other . Human ...
... called Shakespeare plays . The letter to the decipherer , which is in code , contains instructions for cracking the code - useful , of course , only to one who had already done so . Owen's commitment to the truth of his method ...
Contents
Lyric and Power in | 21 |
Shakespeare and the Cannibals | 40 |
Brothers and Others or the Art of Alienation | 67 |
Copyright | |
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Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance Marjorie Garber No preview available - 1987 |