The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, Volume II

311 Pages·2014·3.195 MB·English

by  Paul Cefalu, Gary Kuchar, Bryan Reynolds (eds.)

The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies,
Volume II
Also by Paul Cefalu
THE RETURN OF THEORY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH STUDIES: Tarrying
with the Subjunctive (ed. with Bryan Reynolds, 2010)
ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE AND CONTEMPORARY THEORY: Sublime
Objects of Theology (2007)
MORAL IDENTITY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE (2005)
REVISIONIST SHAKESPEARE: Transitional Ideologies in Texts and Contexts
(2004)
Also by Gary Kuchar
THE POETRY OF RELIGIOUS SORROW IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND (2008)
DIVINE SUBJECTION: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern
England (2005)
Also by Bryan Reynolds
PERFORMANCE STUDIES: Key Words, Concepts and Theories (ed., 2014)
TRANSVERSAL SUBJECTS: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida (2009)
TRANSVERSAL ENTERPRISES IN THE DRAMA OF SHAKEPSEARE AND HIS
CONTEMPORARIES: Fugitive Explorations (2006)
REMATERIALIZING SHAKESPEARE: Authority and Representation on the Early
Modern English Stage (ed. with William West, 2005)
PERFORMING TRANSVERSALLY: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical
Future (2003)
BECOMING CRIMINAL: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in
Early Modern England (2002)
SHAKESPEARE WITHOUT CLASS: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (ed. with
Donald Hedrick, 2000)
The Return of Theory in
Early Modern English
Studies, Volume II
Edited by
Paul Cefalu
Professor, Lafayette College, USA
Gary Kuchar
Associate Professor, University of Victoria, Canada
Bryan Reynolds
Chancellor’s Professor, University of California, Irvine, USA
Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Paul Cefalu, Gary Kuchar and
Bryan Reynolds 2014
Individual chapters © Contributors 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-35104-3
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First published 2014 by
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on the Contributors viii
Introduction 1
Paul Cefalu, Gary Kuchar, and Bryan Reynolds
Part I Posthumanism
1 “Hello Everything”: Renaissance/Post/Human 15
Julian Yates
2 Mad Madge’s Bestiary: Philosophical Animals
and Physiognomic Philosophers in Margaret Cavendish’s
The Blazing World 39
Dan Mills
3 The Bee and the Sovereign (II): Segments, Swarms,
and the Shakespearean Multitude 59
Joseph Campana
Part II Ecocriticism
4 Early Modern Ecocriticism 81
Ken Hiltner
5 Horticulture of the Head: The Vegetable Life of Hair
in Early Modern English Thought 95
Edward J. Geisweidt
6 The Private Lives of Trees and Flowers 117
Douglas Trevor
Part III Historical Phenomenology
7 Shakespearean Softscapes: Hospitality,
Phenomenology, Design 143
Julia Reinhard Lupton
8 Describing the Sense of Confession in Hamlet 165
Matthew J. Smith
9 “’Tis insensible then?”: Time, Language, and Action
in 1 Henry IV 185
James A. Knapp
v
vi Contents
10 ‘We Prove Mysterious by This Love’: John Donne
and the Intimacy of Flesh 207
Christopher Stokes
Part IV Historicism Now
11 Milton, Habermas, and the Dynamics of Debate 237
James Kuzner
12 The Sidney Psalter and the Spiritual Economies of
Abundance 257
Kenneth J.E. Graham
13 The Empedoclean Renaissance 277
Drew Daniel
Selected Bibliography 301
Index 305
Acknowledgements
For the three of us, editing this book has been fascinating and fun, and
so we are grateful to the contributors for dazzling us with their brilliance
and to each other for the distributed cognition that felicitously energized
this project from its initial charge to the final conduction. At Palgrave,
Ben Doyle and Sophie Ainscough have been remarkably attentive all
along. Thank you. As always, Bryan is happy that his family – Kris, Sky,
and Zephyr – are interested in his work, and in the subject matter of
the collection, in particular, especially the non-human and eco-friendly.
Gary would like to thank Bryan and Paul for letting him tag along in
the editing of this volume and the contributors for their excellent work.
Paul thanks Lafayette College, particularly the staff at Skillman Library
and members of the Academic Research Committee for supporting this
project. His new family – Chelsea, Erica, Emma, and Patrick – have made
scholarly work more fulfilling than ever before.
vii
Notes on the Contributors
Joseph Campana is the author of The Pain of Reformation: Spenser,
Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (2012), recipient of the South
Central MLA Book Prize, and two collections of poetry, The Book of
Faces (2005) and Natural Selections (2012), which received the Iowa
Poetry Prize. He has received the Isabel MacCaffrey Essay Prize and the
MLA’s Crompton-Noll Award for LGB studies. Current projects include
a study of children and sovereignty in the works of Shakespeare enti-
tled The Child’s Two Bodies and an edited collection entitled Renaissance
Posthumanism. He is Associate Professor of Renaissance literature at Rice
University.
Paul Cefalu is Professor, Department of English, Lafayette College. His
books include: Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature (2005);
Revisionist Shakespeare: Transitional Ideologies in Texts and Contexts (2004);
English Renaissance Literature and Contemporary Theory: Sublime Objects of
Theology (2007); and, along with Bryan Reynolds, the co-edited vol-
ume, The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with
the Subjunctive (2010). Paul’s current projects include a book on divine
anthropomorphism and accommodation in Early Modern English
literature and theology, as well as a book on cognitive theory, psychoa-
nalysis, and Shakespeare’s Othello.
Drew Daniel is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at
Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of numerous articles on
Renaissance literature, experimental music, and other topics. His most
recent book is The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the
English Renaissance (2013).
Edward J. Geisweidt is a Lecturer in the English Department at the
University of New Haven. He has published work on gender and sexual-
ity in the journals Shakespeare and The Hare. His recent ecocritical work
includes a chapter on spontaneous generation and Antony and Cleopatra
in the Ecocritical Shakespeare (2011) and an essay on population growth
and bastardy in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, published
in Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts: A Field Guide to
Reading and Teaching (2014), which he co-edited with Jennifer Munroe
and Lynne Bruckner.
viii
Notes on the Contributors ix
Kenneth J. E. Graham is the author of The Performance of Conviction:
Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance (1994) and
co-editor with Philip Collington of Shakespeare and Religious Change
(2009). He recently completed “Disciplinary Measures from the Metrical
Psalms to Milton,” a book on the relationship between English poetry
and Reformed church discipline. He teaches in the English Department
at the University of Waterloo.
Ken Hiltner is a professor in the English and Environmental Studies
Departments at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has
written a number of books and articles on Renaissance literature, envi-
ronmental criticism, and the intersection of the two, including Milton
and Ecology (2003), What Else is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and the
Environment (2011), and Essential Ecocriticism (2014).
James A. Knapp is Associate Professor of English and Edward L. Surtz,
S. J. Professor at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of Illustrating
the Past in Early Modern England (2003) and Image Ethics in Shakespeare
and Spenser (2011). His work has appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, ELH,
Criticism, and Poetics Today as well as a variety of essay collections. He is cur-
rently completing a book on early modern attitudes toward the immaterial.
Gary Kuchar is Associate Professor at the University of Victoria and
author of The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England (2008)
and Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early
Modern England (2005).
James Kuzner is Assistant Professor of English at Brown University. He
is the author of Open Subjects and of articles that have appeared in jour-
nals such as ELH, MLQ, and Shakespeare Quarterly.
Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English and Comparative
Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author
or co-author of four books on Shakespeare, including Citizen-Saints:
Shakespeare and Political Theology and Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays
on Politics and Life. She has been involved in a range of editorial projects
on political theology, hospitality, and cognitive and design studies. She
is a 2013–2014 Guggenheim Fellow.
Dan Mills is a Lecturer in the English Department at Clayton State
University where he has taught English Composition, British and world
literature surveys, and professional and technical writing. He recently
completed his PhD in English at Georgia State University where he wrote
his dissertation on early modern utopian literature. His research interests