Seventeenth-Century English Romance

Seventeenth-Century English Romance PDF

Author: A. Zurcher

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2007-05-28

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0230605133

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Overturning the common characterization of Seventeenth Century English prose romance as an exhausted, imitative genre with little bearing on the evolution of the novel, this book argues that early modern romance was a central forum for exploring the newly pressing moral-philosophical and political problem of self-interest.

Seventeenth-Century English Romance

Seventeenth-Century English Romance PDF

Author: A. Zurcher

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2008-03-11

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9781403977526

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Overturning the common characterization of Seventeenth Century English prose romance as an exhausted, imitative genre with little bearing on the evolution of the novel, this book argues that early modern romance was a central forum for exploring the newly pressing moral-philosophical and political problem of self-interest.

Right Romance

Right Romance PDF

Author: Emily Griffiths Jones

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2020-04-23

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 0271085444

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In this book, Emily Griffiths Jones examines the intersections of romance, religion, and politics in England between 1588 and 1688 to show how writers during this politically turbulent time used the genre of romance to construct diverse ideological communities for themselves. Right Romance argues for a recontextualized understanding of romance as a multigeneric narrative structure or strategy rather than a prose genre and rejects the common assumption that romance was a short-lived mode most commonly associated with royalist politics. Puritan republicans likewise found in romance strength, solace, and grounds for political resistance. Two key works that profoundly influenced seventeenth-century approaches to romance are Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which grappled with romance’s civic potential and its limits for a newly Protestant state. Jones examines how these works influenced writings by royalists and republicans during and after the English Civil War. Remaining chapters pair writers from both sides of the war in order to illuminate the ongoing ideological struggles over romance. John Milton is analyzed alongside Margaret Cavendish and Percy Herbert, and Lucy Hutchinson alongside John Dryden. In the final chapter, Jones studies texts by John Bunyan and Aphra Behn that are known for their resistance to generic categorization in an attempt to rethink romance’s relationship to election, community, gender, and generic form. Original and persuasive, Right Romance advances theoretical discussion about romance, pushing beyond the limits of the genre to discover its impact on constructions of national, communal, and personal identity.

Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales

Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales PDF

Author: Bronwyn Reddan

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2020-12

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1496223934

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Love is a key ingredient in the stereotypical fairy-tale ending in which everyone lives happily ever after. This romantic formula continues to influence contemporary ideas about love and marriage, but it ignores the history of love as an emotion that shapes and is shaped by hierarchies of power including gender, class, education, and social status. This interdisciplinary study questions the idealization of love as the ultimate happy ending by showing how the conteuses, the women writers who dominated the first French fairy-tale vogue in the 1690s, used the fairy-tale genre to critique the power dynamics of courtship and marriage. Their tales do not sit comfortably in the fairy-tale canon as they explore the good, the bad, and the ugly effects of love and marriage on the lives of their heroines. Bronwyn Reddan argues that the conteuses' scripts for love emphasize the importance of gender in determining the "right" way to love in seventeenth-century France. Their version of fairy-tale love is historical and contingent rather than universal and timeless. This conversation about love compels revision of the happily-ever-after narrative and offers incisive commentary on the gendered scripts for the performance of love in courtship and marriage in seventeenth-century France.

An Anthology of Seventeenth-century Fiction

An Anthology of Seventeenth-century Fiction PDF

Author: Paul Salzman

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 9780192839558

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Few readers today are aware of the vigorous prose experiments undertaken in the seventeenth century. This anthology presents a representative selection of that work, with examples from Aphra Benn, John Bunyan, William Congreve, Percy Herbert, and Thomas Dangerfield. Also included are MaryWroth's feminist romance Urania and Margaret Cavendish's female utopia The Blazing World , in print here for the first time since their original publication.

The Immaterial Book

The Immaterial Book PDF

Author: Sarah Wall-Randell

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2013-10-28

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0472118773

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In romances—Renaissance England’s version of the fantasy novel—characters often discover books that turn out to be magical or prophetic, and to offer insights into their readers’ selves. The Immaterial Book examines scenes of reading in important romance texts across genres: Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and The Tempest, Wroth’s Urania, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It offers a response to “material book studies” by calling for a new focus on imaginary or “immaterial” books and argues that early modern romance authors, rather than replicating contemporary reading practices within their texts, are reviving ancient and medieval ideas of the book as a conceptual framework, which they use to investigate urgent, new ideas about the self and the self-conscious mind.

The Verneys

The Verneys PDF

Author: Adrian Tinniswood

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2008-05-06

Total Pages: 596

ISBN-13: 9781594483097

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The remarkable story of one English family during the tumultuous seventeenth century, as revealed through their original letters and documents. "To know the Verneys is to know the seventeenth century," Adrian Tinniswood writes in this brilliant book. The Verney family's centuries-long practice of saving every piece of paper that came into their possession -- amassing some 100,000 pages of family and estate letters and documents -- resulted in the largest and most complete private collection of seventeenth-century correspondence in the Western world to date. They paint an incredibly accurate and detailed picture of life in England, Europe, and even the American colonies, through the everyday lives of one extraordinary family.

The Concept of Love in 17th and 18th Century Philosophy

The Concept of Love in 17th and 18th Century Philosophy PDF

Author: Herman de Dijn

Publisher: Leuven University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 905867651X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"Love is joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause." Spinoza's definition of love manifests a major paradigm shift achieved by seventeenth-century Europe, in which the emotions, formerly seen as normative "forces of nature," were embraced by the new science of the mind.This shift has often been seen as a transition from a philosophy laden with implicit values and assumptions to a more scientific and value-free way of understanding human action. But is this rational approach really value-free? Today we tend to believe that values are inescapable, and that the descriptive-mechanical method implies its own set of values. Yet the assertion by Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz, and Enlightenment thinkers that love guides us to wisdom-and even that the love of a god who creates and maintains order and harmony in the world forms the core of ethical behavior-still resonates powerfully with us. It is, evidently, an idea Western culture is unwilling to relinquish.This collection of insightful essays offers a range of interesting perspectives on how the triumph of "reason" affected not only the scientific-philosophical understanding of the emotions and especially of love, but our everyday understanding as well.

Trade and Romance

Trade and Romance PDF

Author: Michael Murrin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-12-16

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 022607160X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In Trade and Romance, Michael Murrin examines the complex relations between the expansion of trade in Asia and the production of heroic romance in Europe from the second half of the thirteenth century through the late seventeenth century. He shows how these tales of romance, ostensibly meant for the aristocracy, were important to the growing mercantile class as a way to gauge their own experiences in traveling to and trading in these exotic locales. Murrin also looks at the role that growing knowledge of geography played in the writing of the creative literature of the period, tracking how accurate, or inaccurate, these writers were in depicting far-flung destinations, from Iran and the Caspian Sea all the way to the Pacific. With reference to an impressive range of major works in several languages—including the works of Marco Polo, Geoffrey Chaucer, Matteo Maria Boiardo, Luís de Camões, Fernão Mendes Pinto, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, and more—Murrin tracks numerous accounts by traders and merchants through the literature, first on the Silk Road, beginning in the mid-thirteenth century; then on the water route to India, Japan, and China via the Cape of Good Hope; and, finally, the overland route through Siberia to Beijing. All of these routes, originally used to exchange commodities, quickly became paths to knowledge as well, enabling information to pass, if sometimes vaguely and intermittently, between Europe and the Far East. These new tales of distant shores fired the imagination of Europe and made their way, with surprising accuracy, as Murrin shows, into the poetry of the period.