The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650

Sanders sheds fresh light on how drama shapes understandings of space and place in the seventeenth century.

Julie Sanders (Author)

9781107463349, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 November 2014

256 pages, 8 b/w illus. 2 maps
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.35 kg

"In addition to her acknowledgement of critics and theorists who have come before, Sanders generously opens up new avenues-paths-waterways for future inquiry. One can imagine a raft of scholarship that will draw on her insights and apply them elsewhere."
-Gavin Hollis,The City University of New York, Hunter College

Literary geographies is an exciting new area of interdisciplinary research. Innovative and engaging, this book applies theories of landscape, space and place from the discipline of cultural geography within an early modern historical context. Different kinds of drama and performance are analysed: from commercial drama by key playwrights to household masques and entertainment performed by families and in semi-official contexts. Sanders provides a fresh look at works from the careers of Ben Jonson, John Milton and Richard Brome, paying attention to geographical spaces and habitats like forests, coastlines and arctic landscapes of ice and snow, as well as the more familiar locales of early modern country estates and city streets and spaces. Overall, the book encourages readers to think about geography as kinetic, embodied and physical, not least in its literary configurations, presenting a key contribution to early modern scholarship.

Introduction: entering the bear pit: cultural geography and early modern drama
1. Liquid landscapes: water, culture, and society in the Caroline period
2. Into the woods: spatial and social geographies in the forest
3. 'Hospitable fabrics': thinking through the early modern household
4. Moving through the landscape: mobility and sites of social circulation
5. Neighbourhoods and networks
6. Writing the city: emergent spaces.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary studies: general [DSB], Theatre studies [AN]