Synopses & Reviews
Reading a wide range of early modern authors and exploring their cultural-historical, philosophical and scientific contexts, Early Modern Writing and the Privatization of Experience examines the shift in focus from reliance on shared experience to placing of trust in individualized experience which occurs in the writing and culture of the period. Nick Davis contends that much of the era's literary production participates significantly in this broad cultural movement.
Covering key writers of the period including Shakespeare, Donne, Chaucer, Spenser, Langland, Hobbes and Bunyan, Davis begins with an overview of the medieval-early modern privatizing cultural transition. He then goes on to offer an analysis of King Lear, Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, The Winter's Tale, and the first three books of The Fairie Queene, among other texts, considering their treatment of the relation between individual life and the life attributed to the cosmos, the idea of symbolic narrative positing a collective human subject, and the forming of pragmatic relations between individual and group.
Synopsis
Explores how writers including Spenser, Jonson, and Shakespeare chart Early Modern culture's shift from the primacy of collective experience to that of individual private life.
Synopsis
Reading a wide range of Early Modern authors and exploring their political, philosophical and scientific contexts, this book charts the movement away from reliance on collective experience, and the construction of the individual as the locus of authentic perception, thought and feeling, which occurs between the fourteenth and early eighteenth centuries. According to Nick Davis, much English writing of the period takes part in this development, examining it, resisting it, and advancing it in several forms. Among the writers discussed are Chaucer, Langland, Thomas More, Spenser, Nashe, Jonson, Middleton, the Shakespeare of the Henry IV - Henry V plays and The Winter's Tale, Hobbes, Bunyan, Defoe and Pope. From there, the book goes on to explore the legacy of Early Modern writing in our contemporary constructions of private experience.
About the Author
Nick Davis is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool, UK. His previous publications include Stories of Chaos: Reason and Its Displacement in Early Modern English Narrative (1999).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Instruments of Change
1. The Private and the Communal - Degrees of Separation
Part A
Introduction: Cosmomorphic Fracture: 'For every man alone thinks that he hath got / To be a Phoenix'
2. 'That Dark Sun': Donne and Melancholic Individuality
3. King Lear and the Death of the World
Part BIntroduction: Collective Representations, Symbolic Narratives
4 Readerly Isolation and Subjective Freedom in
The Faerie Queene 5 Hobbes and Bunyan: The Subsuming Individual Vision
Part CIntroduction: Refiguring Community, Thinking through Festivity
6 Taking Sights in
Richard II - 1 Henry IV 7 A Reconstitution of Community: 'Nature's' Dismantling and Replacement in
The Winter's TaleNotes
Bibliography
Index