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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... cultural practices , or at consider- ing the effects of reproducing cultural images , norms , and ideolo- gies - what might be called the surplus use - value of representation . Frobisher and his men obviously adhere to a more dynamic ...
... cultural speculation rather than mere reflection : a Renaissance version of a mirror - stage , which is to say a mirror - stage precipitated at a cul- tural level rather than at the infantile threshold of the cultural , and one ...
... cultural intransigence , an insistence on retaining his own cultural identity and genealogical heritage , a refusal to cross the boundaries that separate and distinguish brother from other , alien from citizen , Jew from gentile ...
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 |