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This collection of essays explores tragedy, the most versatile of Renaissance literary genres, revealing its astonishing thematic, stylistic and emotional range. Each chapter consists of a case study, offering not only a definition of a particular kind of Renaissance tragedy but also new research into an important example of that genre. There is only one chapter on Shakespeare; instead contributors attend to subgenres of tragedy – biblical tragedy and closet drama, for example – in which Shakespeare did not engage and others in which the nature of his influence is interrogated, producing original critical readings of individual plays which show how interventions in these subgenres can be mapped onto debates surrounding numerous important issues, including national identity, the nature of divine authority, early modern youth culture, gender and ethics, as well as questions relating to sovereignty and political intervention. The chapters also highlight the rich range of styles adopted by the early modern tragic dramatists and show how opportunely the genre as a whole is positioned for speaking truth to power. Collectively, these essays reassess the various sub-genres of Renaissance tragedy in ways which respond to the radical changes that have affected the critical landscape over the last few decades.
2 The temporality of genre Just as much as critics need to pay attention to the pan-generic primal soup that provided the nourishing environment from which the novel would finally grow, they also need to acknowledge the cultural background from which generic change draws its inspiration. This background, needless to say, is far too extensive ever to be portrayed exhaustively, but an awareness – as New Historicism had initially promoted – of habits of reading, of censorship and rules about publication, of religious attitudes to art, and of critical debates about
theoretical politicisation of the genre occurred, initially by monarchomachist Protestant publishers and translators of Heliodorus, then by adapters such as Sidney, Shakespeare and Sidney Wroth. In addition to being associated with political discourse, European erotic romance set the standard by which the social and literary significance of chivalric romance was judged. In the French
2 Gothic genres: romances, novels, and the classifications of Irish Romantic fiction In his Revelations of the dead-alive (1824), John Banim depicts his time-travelling narrator encountering future interpretations of the fiction of Walter Scott. In twenty-first-century London, Banim's narrator realises, Scott is little read; when he is, he is understood, as James Kelly points out, ‘not as the progenitor of the historical novel but rather as the last in line of an earlier Gothic style’. 1 According to the readers encountered in his travels
This article considers the exploration of Gothic genericity within two of Mary Elizabeth Braddon‘s neglected penny blood fictions. It observes the way in which genericity comes to be associated with the Gothic as the supposedly disruptive influence of popular literatures is countered by Victorian reviewers. These emphasise such texts’ genericity in order to contain their influence and separate them from superior readerships and literature which is held to transcend generic limitations. Braddon‘s bloods explore this implicit association between the Gothic and genericity and suggest that the latter – identified in terms of the Gothic‘s status as an ephemeral commodity in the penny blood genre – actually enhances rather than limits, the Gothic‘s agency.
This chapter seeks to explore genre conventions in English recipes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 1 Recipes from all periods of English provide a good reflection of language in use. Besides specific words pertaining to plants and other ingredients, recipes portray a less academic type of language in contrast with learned
This chapter focuses on two literary genres that also feature, if in much smaller proportion, in Atkinson’s oeuvre. After her three coming-of-age novels and before embarking on the Jackson Brodie sequence, Atkinson turned to other genres: she wrote a play, Abandonment , which was performed in 2000, 1 and published a collection of stories, Not the End of the World , in
4003 Baxter-A literature:Layout 1 9/9/13 13:03 Page 247 13 THE QUESTION OF GENRE IN W. G. SEBALD’S ‘PROSE’ (TOWARDS A POST-MEMORIAL LITERATURE OF RESTITUTION) Russell J. A. Kilbourn Artists create potentials for the future by exploiting the resources of the past. In literature, the most important carrier of past resources – the central organ of memory – is genre. (Bakhtin in Morson and Emerson 1990: 288) INTRODUCTION Writing in The New Republic in 1998, James Wood noted that the first appearance of The Emigrants caused him to recall ‘Walter Benjamin
; they seem to thrive on systematically re-inventing themselves wholesale, overturning familiar conventions, and exploring a wide range of generic hybrid forms (e.g. combining with comedy, computer game platforms and teen romance narratives). Nevertheless, as Brigid Cherry argues in Horror , there is one factor that ‘remains constant’ in the genre (with the exception of parody