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James Baldwin might be imagined as reaching his greatest level of popularity within this current decade. With the growth of social media activist movements like Black Lives Matter, which captures and catalyzes off a Baldwinian rage, and the publishing of works directly evoking Baldwin, his voice appears more pronounced between the years of 2013 and 2015. Scholars in Baldwin studies, along with strangers who were turned into witnesses of his literary oeuvre, have contributed to this renewed interest in Baldwin, or at least have been able to sharpen the significance of the phenomenon. Publications and performances highlight Baldwin’s work and how it prefigured developments in critical race and queer theories, while also demonstrating Baldwin’s critique as both prophetic and “disturbingly” contemporary. Emerging largely from Baldwin’s timelessness in social and political discourse, and from the need to conjure a figure to demystify the absurd American landscape, these interventions in Baldwin studies follow distinct trends. This essay examines the 2013–15 trends from four vantages: an examination of a return, with revision, to popular work by Baldwin; identifying Baldwin’s work as a contributor to theoretical and critical methodology; Baldwin and intertextuality or intervocality; and a new frontier in Baldwin studies.
, highlighting the exclusionary ways in which history is written and remembered and retelling similar stories from different perspectives to address issues as diverse as abolitionism and segregation, the relationship between science and faith, and predestination and grace, sex work and gender politics, and the state of political thought in the contemporary United States. Robinson is similarly unconventional in her approach to a writing career. In a 2016 lecture published as “Our Public Conversation: How America Talks About Itself” (2018), Robinson makes the
formulation does not completely negate the need for secular political action, sometimes even by women. As Constance Jordan writes about the political and spiritual status of early modern women: ‘In the language of Renaissance political thought, she is a persona mixta : her natural and political self balanced by her spiritual self’ ( 1990 : 23). Though early modern patriarchy often
’s identities as a ‘scientist’ and a ‘statesman’.11 It is certainly clear from several of his works that Bacon found a degree of incommensurability between ethical (specifically Christian) and civic values,12 and that many of the conditions praised in his natural philosophy are condemned Price_04_Ch4 62 14/10/02, 9:33 am Ethics and politics 63 elsewhere in his writings. Markku Peltonen stresses that the repeated identification of Bacon’s philosophical with his political thought relies upon a ‘rhetorical similarity’ which can obscure the distinction Bacon makes between
Essex’s ambitions to ‘become an other Henry the 4 th ’. 4 Essex’s circle has also been strongly associated with the English manifestation of broader intellectual trends: the political thought associated with Roman history, especially Tacitus, which electrified European literati in the later sixteenth century, and the directed reading of history with a serious political purpose
away. Notes 1 For the relationship between Hobbes and Hyde, see Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Edward Hyde and Thomas Hobbes’s Elements of Law, Natural and Politic’, Historical Journal, 32.2 (1989), 303–17. 2 Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, ed. by Paul Seaward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 6–10; the latest and most sophisticated account of the attack on Hobbes in 1666–68 is Jon Parkin, ‘Baiting the Bear: the Anglican attack on Hobbes in the later 1660s’, History of Political Thought, 34.3 (2013), 421–58. 3 Richard Ollard, Clarendon and his Friends (London
temporal kings.124 However, her political thinking –and her claim of a licence to preach –was inherited from the very large number of women writers who had gone before her and for whom the civil wars, but, more significantly, the Republic, represented an authorising moment in English history. Therefore, when Patricia Crawford once argued that the impact of the civil wars and Interregnum ‘was remarkable’, she was absolutely correct. However, this chapter offers an addition to her analysis, finding that the most far-reaching consequences for gender and political thought
This book is about science in theatre and performance. It explores how theatre and performance engage with emerging scientific themes from artificial intelligence to genetics and climate change. The book covers a wide range of performance forms from the spectacle of the Paralympics Opening Ceremony to Broadway musicals, from experimental contemporary performance and opera to educational theatre, Somali poetic drama and grime videos. It features work by pioneering companies including Gob Squad, Headlong Theatre and Theatre of Debate as well as offering fresh analysis of global blockbusters such as Wicked and Urinetown. The book offers detailed description and analysis of theatre and performance practices as well as broader commentary on the politics of theatre as public engagement with science. It documents important examples of collaborative practice with extended discussion of the Theatre of Debate process developed by Y Touring theatre company, exploration of bilingual theatre-making in East London and an account of how grime MCs and dermatologists ended up making a film together in Birmingham. The interdisciplinary approach draws on contemporary research in theatre and performance studies in combination with key ideas from science studies. It shows how theatre can offer important perspectives on what the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has called ‘cosmopolitics’. The book argues that theatre can flatten knowledge hierarchies and hold together different ways of knowing.
Ralph Knevet's Supplement of the Faery Queene (1635) is a narrative and allegorical work, which weaves together a complex collection of tales and episodes, featuring knights, ladies, sorcerers, monsters, vertiginous fortresses and deadly battles – a chivalric romp in Spenser's cod medieval style. The poem shadows recent English history, and the major military and political events of the Thirty Years War. But the Supplement is also an ambitiously intertextual poem, weaving together materials from mythic, literary, historical, scientific, theological, and many other kinds of written sources. Its encyclopaedic ambitions combine with Knevet's historical focus to produce an allegorical epic poem of considerable interest and power.
This new edition of Knevet's Supplement, the first scholarly text of the poem ever published, situates it in its literary, historical, biographical, and intellectual contexts. An extensive introduction and copious critical commentary, positioned at the back of the book, will enable students and scholars alike to access Knevet's complicated and enigmatic meanings, structures, and allusions.