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 21
... waters , makes the sea itself in Stephen's internal eye " a bowl of bitter waters . " As a kind of life - giving liquid , Guinness is , appropriately , a notoriously bitter drink . And perhaps for that reason , in the world of Ulysses ...
... waters , and let it divide the waters from the waters " ) . 5 Biblical scholars disagree about the degree of relationship this Meso- potamian text has to the Priestly creation account . Conservative com- mentators are anxious to avoid ...
... waters issu'd from a Cave " -murmurs , waters , and cave all being associated sym- bolically with maternality , as critics have pointed out . When the paternal Word intervenes , Eve's specular autoeroticism seems to be- come ...
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 |