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  1. Home
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  3. Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England
  • Cited by 31
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
October 2009
Print publication year:
1998
Online ISBN:
9780511585500
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511585500
Subjects:
Literature, Renaissance and Early Modern Literature, British History after 1450, History
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (24)
Information

Book description

When Hamlet complains that Guildenstern 'would pluck out the heart of [his] mystery', he imagines an encounter that recurs insistently in the discourses of early modern England. The struggle by one man to discover the secrets in another's heart is rehearsed not only in plays but in legal records, correspondence, philosophical writing and contemporary social description. In this book Elizabeth Hanson argues that the construction of other people as objects of discovery signalled a reconceptualizing of the 'subject' in both the political and philosophical sense of the term. She examines the records of state torture, plays by Shakespeare and Jonson, 'cony-catching' pamphlets and Francis Bacon's philosophical writing, to demonstrate that the subject was both under suspicion and empowered in this period. Her account revises earlier attempts to locate the emergence of modern subjectivity in the Renaissance, arguing for a more nuanced and localized understanding of the relationship with its medieval past.

Reviews

"Elizabeth Hanson's compelling study provides that intellectual fascination characteristic of deconstructive tactics adroitly executed, particularly those of the 'metaphysical' stamp which yoke through rhetorical violenc what habits of categorical logic keep distinct and may render as contraries." Michael Dixon, Letters in Canada

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