Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance - Hardcover

Witmore, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801443997 ISBN 13: 9780801443992

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Children had surprisingly central roles in many of the public performances of the English Renaissance, whether in entertainments―civic pageants, children's theaters, Shakespearean drama―or in more grim religious and legal settings, as when children were "possessed by demons" or testified as witnesses in witchcraft trials. Taken together, such spectacles made repeated connections between child performers as children and the mimetic powers of fiction in general. In Pretty Creatures, Michael Witmore examines the ways in which children, with their proverbial capacity for spontaneous imitation and their imaginative absorption, came to exemplify the virtues and powers of fiction during this era.

As much concerned with Renaissance poetics as with children's roles in public spectacles of the period, Pretty Creatures attempts to bring the antics of children―and the rich commentary these antics provoked―into the mainstream of Renaissance studies, performance studies, and studies of reformation culture in England. As such, it represents an alternative history of the concept of mimesis in the period, one that is built from the ground up through reflections on the actual performances of what was arguably nature's greatest mimic: the child.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"Written in a vivid and engaging style, Pretty Creatures offers a strikingly original perspective on the early modern images of children as both 'artless and artful.' In a fresh approach, Witmore ties the status of the child as a mimic to the Renaissance debates over mimesis. He draws on contemporary theory and a wonderfully diverse set of sources, both visual and textual, to unfold his fascinating argument about children as representative of the agency of fiction."--Rebecca Bushnell, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania

About the Author

Michael Witmore is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England and the coeditor of Childhood and Children's Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0801443997
• ISBN 13: 9780801443992
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 248