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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2022

Paul Joseph Zajac
Affiliation:
McDaniel College
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Summary

The introduction situates the book’s intellectual project within what scholars have described as an “affective turn” or “emotional turn” across disciplines and, more specifically, a recent attention to the relations between emotion, religion, and literature in the Renaissance. The introduction calls attention to a disproportionate scholarly focus on negative affect, and it provides the intellectual framework for the close readings of religious and literary texts in the chapters that follow. Theorists and literary critics have equated contentedness with passivity and resignation, but I reveal a model of contentment as dynamic, protective, and productive. Although Renaissance articulations were indebted to preceding philosophical schools, especially Stoicism, the English Reformation defined the ways in which writers constructed contentment from available texts and traditions. Reformers explored contentedness as an emotional means to preserve the self and prepare the individual to endure and engage the outside world. These efforts existed alongside representations and revisions of contentment by authors like Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, especially in their pastoral works.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Introduction
  • Paul Joseph Zajac, McDaniel College
  • Book: Emotion and the Self in English Renaissance Literature
  • Online publication: 15 December 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009271653.001
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  • Introduction
  • Paul Joseph Zajac, McDaniel College
  • Book: Emotion and the Self in English Renaissance Literature
  • Online publication: 15 December 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009271653.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Paul Joseph Zajac, McDaniel College
  • Book: Emotion and the Self in English Renaissance Literature
  • Online publication: 15 December 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009271653.001
Available formats
×