Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)

Wood, David Houston

ISBN 10: 0754666751 / ISBN 13: 9780754666752

Published by Routledge, 2009

About this Item

Exploiting a link between early modern concepts of the medical and the literary, this title suggests that the critical attention to the gendered, classed, and raced elements of the embodied early modern subject has been hampered by its failure to acknowledge the role time and temporality play within the scope of these admittedly crucial concerns. Series Editor(s): Crane, Professor Mary Thomas; Turner, Professor Henry S. Num Pages: 210 pages, black & white illustrations. BIC Classification: 2AB; DSB. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 234 x 156 x 13. Weight in Grams: 558. . 2009. 1st Edition. hardcover. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780754666752

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)
• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0754666751
• ISBN 13: 9780754666752
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Exploiting a link between early modern concepts of the medical and the literary, David Houston Wood suggests that the recent critical attention to the gendered, classed, and raced elements of the embodied early modern subject has been hampered by its failure to acknowledge the role time and temporality play within the scope of these admittedly crucial concerns. Wood examines the ways that depictions of time expressed in early modern medical texts reveal themselves in contemporary literary works, demonstrating that the early modern recognition of the self as a palpably volatile entity, viewed within the tenets of contemporary medical treatises, facilitated the realistic portrayal of literary characters and served as a structuring principle for narrative experimentation. The study centers on four canonical, early modern texts notorious among scholars for their structural- that is, narrative, or temporal- difficulties. Wood displays the cogency of such analysis by working across a range of generic boundaries: from the prose romance of Philip Sidney's Arcadia, to the staged plays of William Shakespeare's Othello and The Winter's Tale, to John Milton's stubborn reliance upon humoral theory in shaping his brief epic (or closet drama), Samson Agonistes. As well as adding a new dimension to the study of authors and texts that remain central to early modern English literary culture, the author proposes a new method for analyzing the conjunction of character emotion and narrative structure that will serve as a model for future scholarship in the areas of historicist, formalist, and critical temporal studies.

About the Author

David Houston Wood, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of English at Northern Michigan University, lives in Marquette, Michigan, where he teaches English Renaissance literature.