1,721,013 research outputs found
“Evoking the Atmosphere of a Vanished Society”: la Firenze fantasmatica di Sir Harold Acton in The Soul’s Gymnasium (1982)
No full textFlorence plays a central role both in the existential path and in the vast, multifaceted literary production of Sir Harold Acton (1904-1994), the last of a generation of Anglo-Americans who inhabited the “City of the Lily” more as an idea than a geographical place. Those who read Acton’s pages continuously encounter a coherent thematic thread, in which Florence beauty is both a victim and an antidote to the horror of the twentieth century. With the aim of giving perspective depth to this fascinating relation between an author and his city, the essay offers for the first time an analytical summary of Acton’s macrotext, isolating in it the city of Florence as a narrative chronotope: beyond the different approaches to narration – be it that of the Renaissance, late Baroque or eighteenth-century past, that of Acton's life, or that of fiction – the corpus brings out constant, authorial features in the representation of the city. At the same time, this article also proposes, as a case study, the close reading of The Soul’s Gymnasium, a collection of short stories published by Acton in 1982. This late work encapsulates a final and stratified vision of Florence, whose layers may be peeled back to investigate the physiology of Acton’s gaze on the city. The stories gathered in The Soul’s Gymnasium allow (more than historiography or popularization, eminently linked to data) the free emergence of an “idea” of the city: a fading dream darkened by death, a precious world hovering over the precipice. These stories are the last gift of old age, in which the nostalgic dimension – the awareness that an era is ending forever – is captured with vivid strength and power
«Our Filthy Liues in Swines are Shewd»: Deformed Pigs, Religious Disquiet and Propaganda in Elizabethan England
No full textThis article takes into account some broadsheets published in London between 1562 and 1570, a span of time in which the birth of deformed pigs is read in the light of the conflicts that destabilised the auroral decade of Elizabeth I’s reign. In this period both Protestants and Catholics fostered a symbolic imagery, as a result of which animals (and humans) born with appalling congenital malformations were deciphered instrumentally as manifestations of God’s wrath against the religious and political enemy. In order to highlight the origin, functioning and chronology of this significant cultural phenomenon, the essay offers first a general overview of the allegorical use of monstrosity in early modern Europe, emphasising the central role played by the German printing houses in this process of symbolisation. Subsequently, the research moves from the continent to England to show this process in action in a specific socio-political context and within the boundaries of a well-defined animal species. The pig – per se perceived as a filthy, dirty and obscene beast – embodied further meanings when its anatomy exceeded the laws of nature, and could be interpreted as a mirror of moral and social non-conformity. According to the authors of the documents at the core of this essay, the ‘monstrous pig’ was first a general sign of sinful and unstable times, to become the unequivocal metaphor of treasonous conspiracies fomented against the Queen. No change in the natural order occurred by chance, and spiritual anxiety offered tools and opportunities for the most unscrupulous political interpretations of the “signs from heaven”
VII Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Comedies
No full textThe Year's Work in English Studies is the qualitative narrative bibliographical review of scholarly work on English language and literatures written in English. It is the largest and most comprehensive work of its kind and the oldest evaluative work of literary criticism. The Year’s Work in English Studies does not merely offer annotated or enumerated bibliography entries, but provides expert, critical commentary supplied for every book covered.
Each volume includes a detailed overview from Old English to contemporary critical works for a given year, and contains critical notices for some 1100 books; extensive coverage of English Language, American Literature, New Literatures in English and English Literature; coverage of specialist periodicals; comprehensive indexing by critic, author, and subject; plus bibliographical endnotes for each chapter. YWES is an essential resource for scholars in any field of language or literary studies
'Polished and filed according to the right sence of the author': domesticating Leonardo Fioravanti’s Il reggimento della peste in Elizabethan England
No full textIn the Summer of 1579, while England was facing an umpteenth attack of the plague, London printer John Allde enriched his catalogue of publications for sale with a new title: A Joyfull Jewell. Contayning aswell such excellent orders, preseruatiues and precious practises for the plague. The text was the English translation of Del reggimento della peste, a short treatise published in 1565 by the renowned Bologna physician Leonardo Fioravanti (1517-post 1583). This essay is devoted to the translating history of this work beyond the Channel: by emphasising corrections, retouchings and omissions, the contribution aims at pointing out the ways in which the translator Thomas Hill adapted Fioravanti’s work to a different cultural and pedagogic context. In particular, the article intends to highlight the ways in which Fioravanti’s taste for the marvellous, which is an important part of his narrative talent, is systematically omitted by the translator. Hill eliminates the paratexts (in which Fioravanti discussed, also through interlocutions with the physicians of his time, the difficult triangulation between medicine, mirabilia and preternatural events: early modern Europe was accustomed to include divine wrath among the causes of plague); but then he also omits a large number of chapters not directly related to the central theme (“secreti di natura”, “ragionamenti sopra i pianeti”) that the Bolognese physician had inserted “per dilettatione di molti”. The final purpose of this contribution is therefore to analyse the omission and manipulation strategies underlying the ‘migration’ of the medical text, to show, even in a territory other than a purely narrative one, the anaesthesia of the mirabile. The translational operation that transformed the Regiment into the Jewel produced a meagre and, in some ways, impoverished recipe book of remedia, in which the equilibrium sought by Fioravanti between the delightful and the useful was decidedly unbalanced in favour of the latter
«Shall the Head neuer come to that Nature requireth». Acefalia come simulacro della colpa e del caos nell’Inghilterra della prima età moderna
Full text linkFour English pamphlets (1609-1646) devoted to cases of acephalous births are the starting point for a reflection on the meaning acquired by the “out of the norm” body in early modern England. In an intertwining of theology, politics and medicine, the monster does not appear as a fortuitous event or as a pathological deviation, but as a real simulacrum of guilt: the lack of the head, in the ideological reading of these publications, becomes a symbol – physical and metaphysical at the same time – of shades of disorder in the private or public sphere, and may therefore be used as an effective means of repression. Acephaly says, in an analogical way, about the lack of a guiding principle or the breaking of a hierarchically stable order. In the apocalyptic imagery nourished by the contrast of faiths, God watches over order also through the whims of nature: the headless creature makes itself a sign of divine anger and, through a mechanism of similarity between guilt and deformity, a powerful means of social control.Quattro pamphlet inglesi (1609-1646) dedicati al racconto di nascite acefale costituiscono il punto di avvio di una riflessione intorno al significato assunto dal corpo “fuori norma” nell’Inghilterra della prima età moderna. In un intreccio di teologia, politica e medicina, il mostro umano non vi appare come caso fortuito o come accidente patologico, ma come vero e proprio simulacro della colpa: la mancanza della testa, nella lettura ideologizzata di queste pubblicazioni, si fa simbolo – fisico e metafisico insieme – di una qualche forma di disordine in ambito privato o pubblico, e quindi mezzo efficace di repressione. L’acefalia dice, in maniera analogica, la mancanza di un principio-guida e la rottura di un ordine gerarchicamente stabile. Nell’immaginario apocalittico nutrito dalla contrapposizione di fedi, Dio vigila sull’ordine anche attraverso i capricci di natura: la creatura senza testa si fa segno della collera divina e, attraverso il meccanismo della somiglianza tra colpa e deformità, potente mezzo di controllo sociale
Shakespeare: Criticism: Comedies
No full textThis chapter has four sections: 1. Editions and Textual Studies; 2. Shakespeare in the Theatre; 3. Shakespeare on Screen; 4. Criticism. Section 1 is by Edward B. M. Rendall; section 2 is by Peter J. Smith; section 3 will resume next year; section 4(a) is by Chloe Fairbanks; section 4(b) is by Emanuel Stelzer; section 4(c) is by Shirley Bell; section 4(d) will resume next year; section 4(e) is by Jennifer Rivera; section 4(f) is by Sheilagh Ilona O’Brien; section 4(g) is by Luca Baratta
[Recensione a] Martina Zamparo, Alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, 2022
No full textInnocence and guilt, victims and prosecutors: domestic and social dramas in Mary Moore’s Wonderfull news from the north (1650)
No full textIn Wonderfull News from the North (1650), Mary Moore recounts the story of the bewitchment of her eleven-year-old daughter Margaret Duchamp to en-courage the legal pursuit of the cunning-man John Hutton and Mrs Dorothy Swinow whom the woman believes to be the culprits of the tragedy afflicting her family. The complexity of the story that Wonderfull News from the North tells is reflected in its intricate internal structure, which stitches together vari-ous types of text: the chronicle of facts, transcriptions of Margaret’s “visions”, sequences of dialogue, lists of eyewitnesses, legal proceedings, perorations to the “Corteous Reader”. Writing both documentary and parenetic colours this elaborate text, with autobiography, chronicle and an insistent search for justice interwoven in a manipulative and exaggerated tone. This is a “minor” work of literature, undoubtedly, but one that is of great historical-cultural interest and that has only occasionally received critical attention.
The present work will attempt to unravel the polyphony of voices and inten-tions that give life to Wonderfull News from the North, first by presenting its structural strategies, and then by investigating – at a deeper textual level – the different dramaturgical planes and, in particular, the ways in which, in this ep-isode of microhistory, Margaret’s body became the crossroads of various dra-mas/conflicts. Read attentively, the pamphlet reveals a multiplicity of conflicts, closely related to each other, which involve the socio-political, the domestic and the personal dimension. The trial for witchcraft does not therefore exhaust the narrative richness of the text, although it is undoubtedly the most evident dramatic element, and is what justifies the writing and the very existence of the pamphlet
'A Pope Shut out of Heaven Gates (Thrice)': Erasmus’s Julius as a tool of anti-Catholic propaganda in early modern England
No full textThe present essay follows the editorial vicissitudes of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Julius within England’s boundaries, where it was translated in 1533-1534; in 1673; and in 1719. By interweaving the publishing history of these three English editions with their cultural milieu, it will appear evident that they were ideologically motivated products, whose circulation directly coincided with an upheaval in Catholic matters in the country. The final purpose of this article is to demonstrate how Erasmus’s Julius, with its negative protagonist, was too compelling a weapon not to be used to stigmatise Catholicism and to prevent it from returning to the British Isles
'[T]o leave the Reader in an extasie of thought or admiration': Anonymous Authors/Discerning readers. Narrating the monster in early modern England
No full textThis article investigates anonymity by analysing a corpus of street literature produced in England during the early modern period concerned with cases of monstrous birth. Specific functions of the author’s absence are identified. Scrutinising the contexts of the documents’ publication, isolating phenomena of allusion intertextuality, and highlighting authenticating strategies of the supernatural happening show how the reader has been assigned an active role. Authorial absence tends to become a means of amplifying the event itself, shifting the emphasis from the production of the text to its reception and underscoring the essential hermeneutic effort of a discerning reader
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