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16910 results in European literature

Page 122 of 846

  • 2 - A Sense of Place

  • Emma Simone, Macquarie University, Sydney
  • Book:
    Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    19 April 2017, pp 64-101

  • Summary

    [T]o know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. (MD: 154–5)

    As emphasised in the previous chapter, it is the average everyday lived experience of Being-in-the-world that is a central concern and preoccupation throughout Woolf's writings. Despite the incalculable variety of everyday experiences that any individual may encounter during his or her lifetime, each is always and inevitably located in a particular place, whether it be the home, the street, a city, the countryside, the workplace or an armchair. Place provides the setting and context for all experience. The inherent connection between the individual, experience and place, and how each depends upon the other for definition and actuality, is a view that is repeatedly reinforced throughout Woolf's oeuvre. Woolf's representations of place demonstrate her understanding that such locations provide the individual with the potential means to carry out his or her intentions, form and gather memories, and feel safe and welcome; alternatively, and even simultaneously, Woolf's writings signify place as the site of threat, unease, and thwarted hopes and desires. Place facilitates our connections with the Other and sense of inclusion, as well as our moments of solitude, isolation and exclusion. From conception to death, place is a primordial and integral element of what it means to be human. Emphasised and demonstrated throughout this chapter is the understanding that, for Woolf, place provides a tangible representation of the hierarchies and ideologies that underlie the formations of English society in the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century.

    From the outset of this chapter, it must be acknowledged that the issues of place and spatiality within Being and Time have been largely overlooked or strongly criticised by critics, due mainly to Heidegger's preoccupation with the issues of time and temporality; indeed, as Heidegger emphasises: ‘The temporality of Being-in-the-world’ is ‘the foundation for that spatiality which is specific for Dasein’ (BT: 384). Despite such assertions, as his later work testifies, the notion that space and place are derived from time is a view that Heidegger himself comes to abandon. Works such as Jeff Malpas's monograph, Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World (2008), and Edward Casey's The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (1997) reflect a turn towards Heidegger's Being and Time as a significant contribution to understandings of place.

  • 3 - Being-at-home and Homelessness

  • Emma Simone, Macquarie University, Sydney
  • Book:
    Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    19 April 2017, pp 102-139

  • Summary

    From an existential perspective, the notion of home is arguably one of the more significant expressions of place. Not defined simply as a co-ordinate on a map, home encompasses neighbourhoods, nations, traditions, customs, narrative, myth, the tangible, the imaginable, the dream, as well as each individual's relation to Being. Home has relevance to all humans: despite its multifarious manifestations, our diverse relationships with home – whether positive, negative, or ambivalent – can be life-long and pervasive, creating and rekindling memories, inspiring desires and the imagination, shaping who we are, and how we relate to the Other. As this chapter will elucidate, each individual's involvements in, and experiences of, the various expressions of home have the potential to confirm or deny his or her fundamental sense of belonging in the world.

    For the Western urban dweller, the most typicalontic manifestation of home is the built architectural form. Such physical structures can also be understood from an existential-ontological perspective, insofar as this expression of home is representative of our average everyday involvements in a world that we always already share with others, even in solitude. Characteristically, though not exclusively, such dwellings are defined by the walls that create the rooms that both enclose and divide, as well as the doors that invite or prohibit entry. Such structures are also inevitably filled with objects of various types and forms – from crockery to collectibles and furniture – each of which can be viewed as a reflection of the quotidian life of its inhabitants. It is such ordinary elements of the home that both mark, and are marked by, the daily lives of the individuals who dwell within this particular place.

    Woolf's autobiographical accounts of her formative experiences of home, particularly her relationships and interactions with those with whom she shared such a space, were frequently given fictional representation. What is clear from the various forms of Woolf's writings is that, typically, the domestic spaces of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century were sites that were entrenched in the intrusive prescriptions and expectations of the patriarchal social order. As will be discussed, this understanding is demonstrated through Woolf's frequent representations of the lived body within the context of the private sphere.

  • Introduction

  • Emma Simone, Macquarie University, Sydney
  • Book:
    Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    19 April 2017, pp 1-24

  • Summary

    Referring to the work of the English writer, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), and the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Heidi Storl suggests that a ‘discussion of the seemingly unlikely alliance between these two thinkers generates new strategies by which to “look through” much of our daily experience and discover – even if only momentarily – what it is to be human’ (2008: 303). Despite the marked variances between Woolf and Heidegger in terms of their backgrounds, experiences, vocations, nationalities and political orientations, this book proposes that at the heart of the issue of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared and profound overarching concerns. Such areas of concern include, but are certainly not limited to, the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; an understanding of the individual as a temporal being; the emphasis upon intersubjective relations, insofar as Being-in-theworld is defi ned by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual's relationship to and with the world.

    The focus of this study is Woolf's understanding and representation of the connection between self and world throughout the various forms of her writings from the perspective of the notion of ‘Being-in-theworld’, a term coined by Heidegger in his 1927 text, Being and Time, which refers to an existential-phenomenological analysis of the connection between human beings and the world from the point of view of lived experience and average everyday involvements within particular physical, societal and historical contexts. It is from such a perspective that references to the term ‘world’ throughout the following chapters denote ‘the web of our social and cultural relations, our relations to artifacts, and our relations to nature’ (Thiele 1995: 179). In Being and Time, Heidegger refers to human beings as ‘Dasein’; in its everyday German usage, this term possesses an ontological emphasis that is in keeping with Heidegger's focus in Being and Time, in that it refers principally to ‘the type of Being that is distinctive’ of human beings (Mulhall 2003: 14).

  • Introduction: Theatrical Milton

  • Brendan Prawdzik, Pennsylvania State University
  • Book:
    Theatrical Milton
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    18 April 2017, pp 1-13

  • Summary

    When the poet Andrew Marvell wrote the earliest piece of criticism on Paradise Lost, he imagined John Milton as a staged body: ‘When I beheld the poet blind […]’. Marvell's Milton appears as the Biblical revenger Samson, whom Samson Agonistes, published three years prior, places on stage in the theatre of a false God. ‘On Mr. Milton's Paradise Lost’, published in the prefatory material for the 1674 second edition of the epic, presents a theatrical Milton, an embodiment shaped by audience, politics and scripture – in short, by what he would and did himself shape. He is his own preface, emerging from the conditions of writing. Were we to read the sinews of this body closely, we would, in the process, construct a new model of a poetic career. We would see the precise contours of Milton's interest in theatre and discover how it afforded him resources for poetic and polemical representation, as well as means to know, to transform and to re-present himself.

    At the core of Milton's works is a contradictory relation to theatre that has neither been explained nor properly explored. Typically, scholars have linked Milton to theatre through his interest in genres.2 In 1628, he wrote and performed in a comedic interlude as part of a Cambridge initiation ceremony. In 1632, he wrote a provincial aristocratic progress loosely related to the masque. In 1634, he wrote the Ludlow Maske (‘Comus’). In the early 1640s, he drafted scores of sketches for possible Old Testament, Christian and British historical dramas. Two of the most developed of these sketches are for a drama about the Fall. In 1671, he added to Paradise Regained and the closet drama Samson Agonistes. And yet this evidence tells less than half of the story of Milton's relation to the dramatic medium in its various forms and discourses. Taken alone, it tells a misleading story.

    Scholarly discussion of a ‘dramatic’ presence in Milton is fragmented and contradictory, largely because Milton's application of theatrical structures and engagement with dramatic forms cannot be reduced, at any point in his career, to an unqualified pro- or anti-theatrical stance.

Theatrical Milton
  • Politics and Poetics of the Staged Body
  • Brendan Prawdzik
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    18 April 2017
  • Theatrical Milton brings coherence to the presence of theatre in John Milton through the concept of theatricality. In this book, ‘theatricality’ identifies a discursive field entailing the rhetorical strategies and effects of framing a given human action, including speech and writing, as an act of theatre.

  • Epilogue: A Systemic Corpus

  • Brendan Prawdzik, Pennsylvania State University
  • Book:
    Theatrical Milton
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    18 April 2017, pp 218-223

  • Summary

    Here, I hope to push just beyond the scope of the preceding chapters in order to apply the insights of a theatrical Milton to the behaviour of the Miltonic corpus as a theatrical body. In essence, this consideration offers a definition of what that corpus is, at least insofar as Milton had controlled and consolidated it, to the best of his ability, before his death.

    First, it would be helpful to set forth some definitive aspects of Milton's theatricality as established above:

  • • Theatricality involves an embodied rhetorical performance intended to have an effect on an audience.

  • • Theatricality marks a countering response that works upon this rhetorical body. Theatricality entails a management of a communication between two bodies: that of the rhetor-actor-poet and that of the rhetorical audience-spectators-readers.

  • • Theatricality destabilises identity, threatening to feminise it, to queer it, to render it indecorous, or to render it foolish and risible.

  • • Theatricality identifies a discursive field – entailing the rhetorical strategies and effects of framing a given human action, including speech and writing – as an act of theatre. This discursive field takes its origin in classical rhetorical tradition, in the rhetoric of actio, and becomes richer and more expansive during the political and religious struggles of the middle seventeenth century.

  • • The negotiations of theatricality are negotiations of influences that work to shape the body by way of the passions, which are understood by Milton as a conflux of spiritual feeling, physiological stimulation, and emotions that, in real experience, cannot fully be differentiated.

  • • Theatricality marks limitations of authority by way of the visual field, in the tension between the rhetor-actor-poet's optical force upon a focal point and the menace of an answering gaze that inhabits the periphery and cannot fully be countered; this menace threatens not only to pull upon the theatrical body, but also to disintegrate it. Theatrical experience can thus involve distinct emotions, ranging from confidence to terror, desire to antagonism, and a range of emotions simultaneously.

  • • The negotiations of theatricality can be based on script and understood in relation to script. Both rigid obedience to the letter of the script and a wild improvisation based in the performative, embodied ego will violate script, which is always itself and more than itself.

  • 1 - Speaking Body: The Vacation Exercise and Paradise Lost

  • Brendan Prawdzik, Pennsylvania State University
  • Book:
    Theatrical Milton
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    18 April 2017, pp 14-49

  • Summary

    Did the young John Milton attend a play or two, or perhaps more? Almost certainly. We would expect a young bachelor to take in a play here and there. We would expect that re-stagings of Shakespeare and original works by Ben Jonson, or, perhaps, by Milton's Cambridge peer Thomas Randolph, might allure an aspiring poet. Milton implies in two early works that he had attended plays. In Elegia sexta, he writes to Charles Diodati about visiting and fearing to lose himself in the playhalls. Moreover, in ‘L'Allegro’, we learn of the poet's desire to catch a comedy by Shakespeare or a tragedy by Jonson. Later, in the Apology, he would locate himself within the audience of a Cambridge play, as an intensely invested, discerning spectator who joins the crowd in hissing bad actors from the stage. There is speculative evidence, too, that Milton had experienced the popular drama of the London playhalls. A John Milton – not our poet, but perhaps his father – was, for a time, a shareholder of the Blackfriars playhall.

    Just as there is no evidence in Milton's writings that he viewed public theatre uncritically, so, too, is there no evidence that he abjured it, that he thought it unfit for his person. The drama, as he encountered it in books, in college or in London, offered models for his own mimeses. The metaphor driving Shakespeare's dramaturgy – of the world as a stage – was one of action, of performing bodies seen by spectators. Indeed, as so much New Historical scholarship has shown, the sign of the staged actor could work as a structural principle underlying late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English culture more broadly.

    Accordingly, theatre in Milton absorbs its conceptual power from a number of places and centres of social organisation. He read anti-theatrical literature, including Lactantius, Tertullian and, perhaps, William Prynne. He might have attended sermons that decried theatre and, like many contemporaries, might have considered the theatricality of the preachers while attending their sermons. Monarchy, of course, was inherently theatrical, a fact as evident in Milton's Eikonoklastes as in Shakespeare's Richard III and Henry IV, Part I, half a century before.

  • 4 - Theatre of Vegetable Love: Paradise Lost

  • Brendan Prawdzik, Pennsylvania State University
  • Book:
    Theatrical Milton
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    18 April 2017, pp 130-169

  • Summary

    During the early 1640s, the theatre of print, as Milton imagined it, showed him encompassed by an allied audience, performing a type of exegetical poetics that, despite being impelled by zeal, was nonetheless constrained by cultural discourses and interpretive manoeuvres that he was beginning to understand but that he could not fully control. At the same time, he was theorising a type of drama that appears, for the most part, devoid of the struggles and complexities of character that defined his own experience in print culture and that would be so integral to the greatness of Paradise Lost. His consideration of the public staging of dramas in a newly reformed London manifested in scores of sketches, in the Trinity Manuscript, for dramas based on stories from scripture and British history. Together, these evince his desire for England to achieve the moral and spiritual edification that would be required of a nation aspiring to be a vanguard of the coming Millennium.

    However, by the time that Milton began to write Paradise Lost in the mid-1650s, his faith in a general populace would be all but gone. The final passage of the second edition of the Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660) implored, on the eve of the Restoration, a remaining

    abundance of sensible and ingenuous men […] to bethink themselves a little and consider whether they are rushing; to exhort this torrent also of the people, not to be so impetuos, but to keep thir due channel [… ;] to stay these ruinous proceedings; justly and timely fearing to what a precipice of destruction the deluge of this epidemic madness would hurrie us through the general defection of a misguided and abus'd multitude.

    Paradise Lost (1667) opens with a view to the innumerable fallen angels, who are ‘rowling in the fiery Gulfe’, the ‘fiery Deluge’, after having been ‘Hurld headlong flaming […] / With hideous ruine and combustion down / To bottomless perdition’. The final passage from the Readie and Easie Way and the opening scene of Paradise Lost form a continuity of various implication.

  • Series Editor's Preface

  • Brendan Prawdzik, Pennsylvania State University
  • Book:
    Theatrical Milton
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    18 April 2017, pp viii-x

  • Summary

    Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture may, as a series title, provoke some surprise. On the one hand, the choice of the word ‘culture’ (rather than, say, ‘literature’) suggests that writers in this series subscribe to the now widespread assumption that the ‘literary’ is not isolable, as a mode of signifying, from other signifying practices that make up what we call ‘culture’. On the other hand, most of the critical work in English literary studies of the period 1500–1700 which endorses this idea has rejected the older identification of the period as ‘the Renaissance’, with its implicit homage to the myth of essential and universal Man coming to stand (in all his sovereign individuality) at the centre of a new world picture. In other words, the term ‘culture’ in the place of ‘literature’ leads us to expect the words ‘early modern’ in the place of ‘Renaissance’. Why, then, ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture’?

    The answer to that question lies at the heart of what distinguishes this critical series and defines its parameters. As Terence Cave has argued, the term ‘early modern’, though admirably egalitarian in conception, has had the unfortunate effect of essentialising the modern – that is, of positing ‘the advent of a once-and-for-all modernity’ which is the deictic ‘here and now’ from which we look back. The phrase ‘early modern’, that is to say, forecloses the possibility of other modernities, other futures that might have arisen, narrowing the scope of what we may learn from the past by construing it as a narrative leading inevitably to Western modernity, to ‘us’. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture aims rather to shift the emphasis from a story of progress – early modern to modern – to series of critical encounters and conversations with the past, which may reveal to us some surprising alternatives buried within texts familiarly construed as episodes on the way to certain identifying features of our endlessly fascinating modernity. In keeping with one aspect of the etymology of ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Rinascimento’ as ‘rebirth’, moreover, this series features books that explore and interpret anew elements of the critical encounter between writers of the period 1500–1700 and texts of Greco-Roman literature, rhetoric, politics, law, oeconomics, eros and friendship.

  • 5 - Passion's Looking-Glass: Samson Agonistes

  • Brendan Prawdzik, Pennsylvania State University
  • Book:
    Theatrical Milton
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    18 April 2017, pp 170-217

  • Summary

    Samson Agonistes would seem to lend itself easily to a book on Milton's theatricality. After all, it is Milton's one true drama – albeit, one ‘never […] intended’ to be staged – and at its heart is a protagonist who performs on stage in a ‘spacious Theatre’. By now, the general case is closed: theatre meant a great deal to Milton the poet; it provided a range of representational resources from which he drew often; it helped to transform his poetic response to scripture; it helped him to represent the Fall and a postlapsarian ethics based in the passions; and it continually worked to reshape his understanding of interiority and of his own role as a poet. Yet the presence of Samson on stage at the point of the drama's catastrophe – when he actually tears down a theatre – poses extraordinary challenges. For the most part, we have considered the signification of the theatrical body; while such signification is often complexly systemic and, to a greater or lesser extent unstable, Samson Agonistes works to create an aesthetic experience of polysemic theatricality. In an important contribution to scholarly discussion, Fish observed that the failure of Samson's body to signify – a failure that is, in the event, ultimately indistinguishable from polysemy – is central to the reading experiences dramatised within the text and the experience of the reader without. The broadest purpose of this chapter is to explore how the ambiguities that have generated so many disparate views do signify, and were intended to signify, in Milton's theatrical poetics.

    Scholars have shown extraordinary creativity in arguing how, why and to what effect Samson is prompted by God – either in his decision to go with the Philistine Officer to perform in the Dagonalian festival or in his final act of strength – to murder three thousand people and to kill himself in the process. Samson is a deeply troubling character, a problem for which solutions have been many and diverse: Samson Agonistes dramatises a refinement of carnal passions into spiritual intellect. The drama is a Christian tragedy that shows a ‘modern’ Samson ‘becom[ing] his own man’. God recuperates him by sending him ‘secret refreshings’ that help to refine his heart and mind, and thus to realign him with God's purposes.

  • 3 - Bending the Fool: Animadversions and the Early Prose

  • Brendan Prawdzik, Pennsylvania State University
  • Book:
    Theatrical Milton
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    18 April 2017, pp 86-129

  • Summary

    ‘Ha, ha, ha’.

    More than any other line that Milton published, this burst of mocking laughter, targeting a respected Anglican bishop, in the Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnuus (1641), would make any pious Miltonist wince. As unwieldy as its title, Animadversions is not Milton's finest work. Editors have found it so insignificant and offputting that it does not appear in any collection of the selected prose. Of course, paradigm shifts can illumine value long obscured. For instance, the brutal and jagged Titus Andronicus was so reviled by critics that many assumed that Shakespeare could not have had a hand in it. (It is broadly accepted that George Peele wrote at least the first act.) Not until Eugene Waith's illuminations on the play's Ovidian poetics of trauma was its status in the Shakespeare canon confirmed. What had seemed blemishes were now part of a sophisticated, however uncouth, artistic vision. Animadversions is, as it were, Milton's Titus. Yet if we examine it within the contexts of Milton's theatricality and the theatricality of mid-seventeenth-century polemical culture, we will see that it is one of the most significant texts in his development as an author.

    Animadversions is one of Milton's first prose tracts. Milton published Of Reformation in May 1641 and followed quickly with Of Prelaticall Episcopacy in June or July. Later in July, he published Animadversions, which, like his previous tracts, was printed anonymously. Likely, Milton had also written the postscript to the first publication by Smectymnuus in March. ‘Smectymnuus’ was a corporate pseudonym composed of the initials of five Presbyterian divines: Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen and William Spurstow. These responded to Bishop Joseph Hall's An Humble Remonstrance to the High Court of Parliament, published in January 1641, with An Answer to a Book, Entituled An Humble Remonstrance, in March. In April, this tract was followed by Hall's Defence of the Humble Remonstrance, which, in June, was answered by the Smectymnuans in their Vindication of the Answer, shortly before the appearance of Animadversions. Milton appears to have radicalised, at least to some extent, in the late 1630s, around the time that he penned ‘Lycidas’, and he appears to have been meeting with Smectymnuans by 1640.

Page 122 of 846