Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods and the Virtue of Vulnerability (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture)

Kuzner, James

ISBN 10: 0748642536 / ISBN 13: 9780748642533

Published by Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2011

About this Item

2011. x, 222pp. "Studies of the republican legacy have proliferated in recent years, always to argue for a polity that cultivates the virtues, protections, and entitlements which foster the self's ability to simulate an invulnerable existence . At a time when the drive to safeguard citizens has gathered enough momentum to justify almost any state action, Open Subjects questions whether vulnerability is the evil we so often believe it to be." Water (brown) staining to edges, to edges of boards and to edges of the unclipped dust jacket. Both book and dust jacket are otherwise in very good condition. All contents are tight and clean. There are no inscriptions.

Seller Inventory # LitCrit145

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods and the Virtue of Vulnerability (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture)
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0748642536
• ISBN 13: 9780748642533
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition
• Condition: Very Good-
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good-
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature

About this title

Synopsis

'This is revelatory work that pries open challenging literary texts to reveal human vulnerability as a central thematic and political element. Kuzner will change our thinking about the early modern subject.'
Barbara Correll, Cornell University
'Sensitive to ambient changes in social life, Kuzner's heroes of vulnerability, adrift in an unguarded existence where immune defenses have been turned off, hatch scripts for "worlds elsewhere," alternative modernities founded on pleasure, enjoyment, and the forms of openness they incite and sustain.'
Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life
Studies of the republican legacy have proliferated in recent years, always to argue for a polity that cultivates the virtues, protections and entitlements which foster the self's ability to simulate an invulnerable existence. James Kuzner's original new study of writing by Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell and Milton is the first to present a genealogy for the modern self in which its republican origins can be understood far more radically. In doing so, this study is also the first to draw radical and republican thought into sustained conversation, and to locate a republic for which vulnerability is, unexpectedly, as much what community has to offer as it is what community guards against. At a time when the drive to safeguard citizens has gathered enough momentum to justify almost any state action, Open Subjects questions whether vulnerability is the evil we so often believe it to be.

About the Author

James Kuzner is Assistant Professor of English at Brown University.