Immateriality and Early Modern English Literature: Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert

Description

Examines literary engagement with immateriality since the ‘material turn’ in early modern studies Provides six case studies of works by Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert, offering new readings of important literary texts of the English Renaissance alongside detailed chapters outlining attitudes towards immateriality in works of natural philosophy, medicine, and theology Employs an innovative organization around three major areas in which problem of immaterial was particularly pitched: Ontology, Theology, and Psychology (or Being, Believing, and Thinking) Includes wide-ranging references to early modern literary, philosophical, and theological texts Demonstrates how innovations in natural philosophy influenced thought about the natural world and how it was portrayed in literature Engages with current early modern scholarship in the areas of material culture, cognitive literary studies, and phenomenology Immateriality and Early Modern English Literature explores how early modern writers responded to rapidly shifting ideas about the interrelation of their natural and spiritual worlds. It provides six case studies of works by Shakespeare, Donne and Herbert, offering new readings of important literary texts of the English Renaissance alongside detailed chapters outlining attitudes towards immateriality in works of natural philosophy, medicine and theology. Building on the importance of addressing material culture in order to understand early modern literature, Knapp demonstrates how the literary imagination was shaped by changing attitudes toward the immaterial realm. Acknowledgements Series Editor’s Preface Introduction: Shakespeare’s Naught 1. Immateriality and the Language of Things PART I: BEING 2. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth’: Material and Immaterial Substance and Early Modern Ontology 3. ‘For I must nothing be’: Richard II and the Immateriality of Self 4. ‘’Tis insensible, then?’: Concept and Action in 1 Henry IV PART II: BELIEVING 5. The Visible and the Invisible: Seeing the Earthly – Believing the Spiritual 6. ‘When thou knowest this, thou knowest’: Intention, Intuition and Temporality in Donne’s Anatomy of the World 7. ‘a brittle crazy glass’: George Herbert and the Experience of the Divine PART III: THINKING 8. Cognition and Its Objects, or Ideas and the Substance of Spirit(s) 9. ‘Thinking makes it so’: Mind, Body and Spirit in The Rape of Lucrece, Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing 10. ‘Neither Fish nor Flesh, nor Good Red Herring’: Phenomenality, Representation and Experience in The Tempest Coda Bibliography Index