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– Lily Campbell’s argument for each tragedy’s ruling passion, John Draper’s naming of each character’s temperament. 2 Of special interest is Paster’s work: passions in English Renaissance drama closely relate to bodily elements and humoral fluids, though some characters boast a ‘humour’ just to gain social status. I am deeply indebted to Paster, but seek to widen her materialist
IN THE STUDY OF Renaissance emotion, especially in relation to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, it doesn’t take long before coming across the work of Thomas Wright ( c. 1561–1623). 1 His The Passions of the Minde in Generall , first published in 1601, has become something of a touchstone for literary scholars, offering
of the tragedies, especially King Lear, the impoverished venue where epiphany gains full effect in Shakespeare’s works. Lear’s empathetic defence of Tom, the Bethlehem beggar who is terrified of fiends and obsessed with his sins, matches Southwell’s allegory of the Passion in Spiritual Exercises
year, which together brought distant moments into close proximity. 15 With its propensity to bring different moments together, Serres’ topology is particularly suited to the discussion of intermediary spaces, or what Kathleen Biddick calls ‘unhistorical temporalities’. 16 The Nativity plays partake of such an intermediary space because Christ has come, but has not yet died. As the following examination of the gospel shows, this is a moment which falls awkwardly between Passover and Passion, Hebrew and Christian law, Incarnation and Crucifixion, and prophecy and
chap 5 27/7/06 8:19 am Page 155 5 Excess, passion and the uncanny: The Devil’s Larder (2001) and Six [Genesis] (2003) The Devil’s Larder As Crace explains, the choice of food as the interlinking theme and subject matter for The Devil’s Larder is not simply gastronomic, but reflects a series of cultural and personal changes, often quite radical ones, which have taken place during his lifetime. He recalls the dreariness of the food in the immediate postwar period and the significance of the transitions that followed: During my lifetime, this is one of the
At the time of their publication, Joanna Baillie‘s dramas were considered to be works of genius in their sustained and powerful fixation on one of the several possible human passions. In their very focus on these intense emotions, however, the plays actually reified the dangers inherent in the extremes of human passion. In other words, by fixing her attention on the passions, Baillie revealed that the emotions she was supposedly focused on often masked other, even more powerful desires. Thus, in Orra fear is the result of the heroines hatred of male dominance, while in De Monfort hatred is shown to be the symptom of incestuous love. But what has not been noticed about Baillie‘s plays is their almost obsessive interest in dead, abjected male bodies. Both plays present a very gothic vision of the indestructible patriarchy, an uncanny phallic power that cannot die, that persistently resurrects and feeds on itself or the legends that it has constructed.
This article traces how the queer Black writer James Baldwin’s transnational palate and experiences influenced the ways he wrote about Black domestic spaces in the late twentieth century. In the 1960s and 1970s, while Black feminist cooks and writers like Edna Lewis, Jessica B. Harris, and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor developed new theories of soul food in relation to the Black American community and broader American cuisine, Baldwin incorporated these philosophies and transnational tastes into his lifestyle and works. He traveled and worked around Europe, settling in places like Paris, Istanbul, and Saint-Paul de Vence for years at a time. In Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent his last years, he set up his own welcome table, at which he hosted internationally renowned guests and shared his love of cuisine. Inevitably, Baldwin’s passion for cooking and hosting meals became a large, though scholarly neglected, component of his novels and essays. In his novels Another Country, which he finished in Istanbul and published in 1962, and Just Above My Head, which he finished in Saint-Paul de Vence and published in 1979, Baldwin’s depictions of food and Black kitchens take a queer turn. Instead of lingering on traditional Black family structures, these texts specifically present new formulations of intimate home life and reimagine relationships between food, kitchens, race, and sex in the late twentieth century.
This article explores the more detached and ironic view of Blake that emerged in the 1970s compared to appropriations of him in the 1960s, as evident in three science-fiction novels: Ray Nelson’s Blake’s Progress (1977), Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977), and J. G. Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company (1979). In adopting a more antagonistic posture towards Blake, all three of these books reflect increasingly ambivalent attitudes towards the countercultures of the 1960s, and can be read as critical of some of those very energies that the Romantic movement was seen to embody. Thus Nelson rewrites the relationship of William and Catherine, in which the engraver comes under the influence of a diabolic Urizen, while Carter recasts the Prophet Los as a Charles Manson-esque figure. Even Ballard, the most benign of the three, views Blakean energy as a release of potentially dangerous psychopathologies. In all the novels, we see a contrarian use of misprision, rewriting Blake as Blake had rewritten Milton.
This collection of essays offers a major reassessment of the meaning and significance of emotional experience in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Recent scholarship on early modern emotion has relied on a medical-historical approach, resulting in a picture of emotional experience that stresses the dominance of the material, humoral body. The Renaissance of Emotion seeks to redress this balance by examining the ways in which early modern texts explore emotional experience from perspectives other than humoral medicine.
The chapters in the book seek to demonstrate how open, creative and agency-ridden the experience and interpretation of emotion could be. Taken individually, the chapters offer much-needed investigations into previously overlooked areas of emotional experience and signification; taken together, they offer a thorough re-evaluation of the cultural priorities and phenomenological principles that shaped the understanding of the emotive self in the early modern period. The Renaissance of Emotion will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, the history of emotion, theatre and cultural history, and the history of ideas.