Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture

These essays by leading scholars offer a new focus on the Renaissance via objects rather than subjects.

Margreta de Grazia (Edited by), Maureen Quilligan (Edited by), Peter Stallybrass (Edited by)

9780521454711, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 February 1996

420 pages, 47 b/w illus.
23.7 x 16 x 2.8 cm, 0.769 kg

"This focus on rethinking the relationship between subject and object is certainly worthwhile and novel. And the essays that follow include some dazzling explorations of this theme." Jvotsna G. Singh, Shakespeare Quarterly

This collection of original essays brings together some of the most prominent figures in new historicist and cultural materialist approaches to the early modern period, and offers a new focus on the literature and culture of the Renaissance. Traditionally, Renaissance studies have concentrated on the human subject. The essays collected here bring objects - purses, clothes, tapestries, houses, maps, feathers, communion wafers, tools, pages, skulls - back into view. As a result, the much-vaunted early modern subject ceases to look autonomous and sovereign, but is instead caught up in a vast and uneven world of objects which he and she makes, owns, values, imagines, and represents. This book puts things back into relation with people; in the process, it elicits new critical readings, and new cultural configurations.

Introduction Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass
Part I. Priority of Objects: 1. The ideology of superfluous things: King Lear as period piece Margreta de Grazia
2. Rude mechanicals Patricia Parker
3. Spenser's domestic domain: poetry property and the Early Modern subject Louis A. Montrose
Part II. Materialisations: 4. Gendering the Crown Stephen Orgel
5. The unauthored 1539 volume in which is printed the Hecatomphile, The Flowers of French Poetry and Other Soothing Things Nancy J. Vickers
6. Dematerialisations: textile and textual properties in Ovid, Sandys, and Spenser Ann Rosalind Jones
Part III. Appropriations: 7. Freedom service and the trade in slaves: the problem of labour in Paradise Lost Maureen Quilligan
8. Feathers and flies: Aphra Behn and the seventeenth-century trade in exotica Margaret W. Ferguson
9. Unlearning the Aztec Cantares (Preliminaries to a postcolonial history) Gary Tomlinson
Part IV. Fetishisms: 10. Worn worlds: clothes and identity on the Renaissance stage Peter Stallybrass
11. The Countess of Pembroke's literal translation Jonathan Goldberg
12. Remnants of the sacred in early modern England Stephen Greenblatt
Part V. Objections: 13. The insincerity of women Marjorie Garber
14. Desire is death Jonathan Dollimore
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]