The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
(Paperback)
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Publishing Details
The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
By (Author) Richard Meek
Edited by Erin Sullivan
Manchester University Press
Manchester University Press
2nd June 2017
United Kingdom
Classifications
Physical Properties
Paperback
288
Width 138mm, Height 216mm
Description
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 this period. -- .
Reviews
The Renaissance of Emotion seeks to broaden our frame of reference, locating early modern emotions within a wider cultural framework of religion, philosophy, politics, and rhetoric.
Katharine A. Craik, Oxford Brookes University, Renaissance Quarterly 69.4 (Winter 2016)
An important collection of essays that can stand as a survey-sample of some of the best work currently being done in the field. The thoughtful and carefully argued introduction offers a historiographical overview of the rise to prominence of the emotions in philosophy, psychology and literary studies, challenges some of the established critical orthodoxies, and opens some avenues into new research.
Freya Sierhuis (York), Bcherschau
Every well-crafted essay has something genuinely original to offer and which is indeed taking discussion forward.
Lesel Dawson is a senior lecturer at in the department of English at Bristol University. Eric Langley is a lecturer in the department of English at University College London, Early Theatre 20.1
Author Bio
Richard Meek is Lecturer in English at the University of Hull
Erin Sullivan is Lecturer and Fellow in the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
