Doyeeta Majumder
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781786941688
- eISBN:
- 9781789623260
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941688.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This book examines the fraught relationship between the sixteenth-century formulations of the theories of sovereign violence, tyranny and usurpation and the manifestations of these ideas on the ...
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This book examines the fraught relationship between the sixteenth-century formulations of the theories of sovereign violence, tyranny and usurpation and the manifestations of these ideas on the contemporary English stage. It will attempt to trace an evolution of the poetics of English and Scottish political drama through the early, middle, and late decades of the sixteenth-century in conjunction with developments in the political thought of the century, linking theatre and politics through the representations of the problematic figure of the usurper or, in Machiavellian terms, the ‘New Prince’. While the early Tudor morality plays are concerned with the legitimate monarch who becomes a tyrant, the later historical and tragic drama of the century foregrounds the figure of the illegitimate monarch who is a tyrant by default. On the one hand the sudden proliferation of usurpation plots in Elizabethan drama and the transition from the legitimate tyrant to the usurper tyrant is linked to the dramaturgical shift from the allegorical morality play tradition to later history plays and tragedies, and on the other it is reflective of a poetic turn in political thought which impelled political writers to conceive of the state and sovereignty as a product of human ‘poiesis’, independent of transcendental legitimization. The poetics of political drama and the emergence of the idea of ‘poiesis’ in the political context merge in the figure of the nuove principe: the prince without dynastic claims who creates his sovereignty by dint of his own ‘virtu’ and through an act of law-making violence.Less
This book examines the fraught relationship between the sixteenth-century formulations of the theories of sovereign violence, tyranny and usurpation and the manifestations of these ideas on the contemporary English stage. It will attempt to trace an evolution of the poetics of English and Scottish political drama through the early, middle, and late decades of the sixteenth-century in conjunction with developments in the political thought of the century, linking theatre and politics through the representations of the problematic figure of the usurper or, in Machiavellian terms, the ‘New Prince’. While the early Tudor morality plays are concerned with the legitimate monarch who becomes a tyrant, the later historical and tragic drama of the century foregrounds the figure of the illegitimate monarch who is a tyrant by default. On the one hand the sudden proliferation of usurpation plots in Elizabethan drama and the transition from the legitimate tyrant to the usurper tyrant is linked to the dramaturgical shift from the allegorical morality play tradition to later history plays and tragedies, and on the other it is reflective of a poetic turn in political thought which impelled political writers to conceive of the state and sovereignty as a product of human ‘poiesis’, independent of transcendental legitimization. The poetics of political drama and the emergence of the idea of ‘poiesis’ in the political context merge in the figure of the nuove principe: the prince without dynastic claims who creates his sovereignty by dint of his own ‘virtu’ and through an act of law-making violence.
John O'Neill
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853239963
- eISBN:
- 9781846313059
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846313059
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
The author reads Michel de Montaigne's Essays from their central principle of friendship as a communicative and pedagogical practice operative in society, literature, and politics. The friendship ...
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The author reads Michel de Montaigne's Essays from their central principle of friendship as a communicative and pedagogical practice operative in society, literature, and politics. The friendship between Michel de Montaigne and Étienne de La Boétie was ruled neither by plenitude nor lack, but by a capacity for recognition and transitivity. As an essayist, Montaigne is an exemplary practitioner of a technique of difference and recognition that puts all certainties of history, philosophy, and culture in the balance of weighted comparison. The essayist reveals how every absolute subjectivity or authority is shaken by its internal weakness once we move inside the contrastive structure of domination in politics, gender, and race. The author's reading of the Essays strives to be faithful to the phenomenology of their embodied practices of reading-to-write to re-read and re-write. From this standpoint he engages the principal critical readings of the Essays over the last century that have examined with great brilliance their history, structure, and psychology. Whether the structure is evolutionary, structuralist, Marxist, or psychoanalytical, the author provides close readings of Montaigne's literary critics. By bringing to bear the ethico-critical practice of ‘essaying’ to resist the subjection of the Essays to dominant criticism, he reminds readers that Montaigne's appeal is in how he survived bloody cultural war with a balance of modesty and tolerance, invoking compromise where others practice violence.Less
The author reads Michel de Montaigne's Essays from their central principle of friendship as a communicative and pedagogical practice operative in society, literature, and politics. The friendship between Michel de Montaigne and Étienne de La Boétie was ruled neither by plenitude nor lack, but by a capacity for recognition and transitivity. As an essayist, Montaigne is an exemplary practitioner of a technique of difference and recognition that puts all certainties of history, philosophy, and culture in the balance of weighted comparison. The essayist reveals how every absolute subjectivity or authority is shaken by its internal weakness once we move inside the contrastive structure of domination in politics, gender, and race. The author's reading of the Essays strives to be faithful to the phenomenology of their embodied practices of reading-to-write to re-read and re-write. From this standpoint he engages the principal critical readings of the Essays over the last century that have examined with great brilliance their history, structure, and psychology. Whether the structure is evolutionary, structuralist, Marxist, or psychoanalytical, the author provides close readings of Montaigne's literary critics. By bringing to bear the ethico-critical practice of ‘essaying’ to resist the subjection of the Essays to dominant criticism, he reminds readers that Montaigne's appeal is in how he survived bloody cultural war with a balance of modesty and tolerance, invoking compromise where others practice violence.
John O'Brien and Malcolm Quainton
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853237853
- eISBN:
- 9781846312977
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846312977
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This book aims to introduce readings of French Renaissance literature, drawing on the perspectives of contemporary literary theories. The volume is organised by paired readings of five major ...
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This book aims to introduce readings of French Renaissance literature, drawing on the perspectives of contemporary literary theories. The volume is organised by paired readings of five major sixteenth-century French writers, with interpretations covering, among others, structuralism, semiotics, feminism and psychoanalysis. Linking these interpretations is a constant interest in problems such as the role of the reader, the nature of the text and the question of gender. The Introduction contextualises the encounter between literary theory and Renaissance texts by using the contributions as pivotal points in the development of critical thinking about this period in early modern literature.Less
This book aims to introduce readings of French Renaissance literature, drawing on the perspectives of contemporary literary theories. The volume is organised by paired readings of five major sixteenth-century French writers, with interpretations covering, among others, structuralism, semiotics, feminism and psychoanalysis. Linking these interpretations is a constant interest in problems such as the role of the reader, the nature of the text and the question of gender. The Introduction contextualises the encounter between literary theory and Renaissance texts by using the contributions as pivotal points in the development of critical thinking about this period in early modern literature.
