Emotive language is now best understood by combining the analytic techniques of classical rhetoric with current linguistic practices. With or without prompting, the 'passions' of Renaissance culture can stir contrary feelings in today's readers, which are enlisted to validate a range of theorised responses. This book will mediate between critics, readers, the author and the original audience, using the 'New Rhetoric' to open fresh perspectives on writers as diverse as Christopher Marlowe, Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish.

This guide provides the best practices and reference resources, both print and electronic, that can be used in conducting research on literature of the British Renaissance and Early Modern Period. This volume seeks to address specific research characteristics integral to studying the period, including a more inclusive canon and the predominance of Shakespeare.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy -- PART I: Women as Protagonists in Male-Authored Drama: Comedy and tragedy -- 1 Fathers, Daughters, Crossdressing, and Names: Women, Rhetoric, and Education in Commedia Erudita -- Coda: "Margherita Costa's Li buffoni (1641): The First (Extant) Female-Authored Scripted Comedy"--2 Fashioning a Genealogy: The Rhetoric of Friendship and Female Virtue in Italian Renaissance tragedy -- Coda: Valeria Miani's Celinda (1611) among Fin de Siècle Italian Tragedies -- PART II: Women as Authors/Women as Protagonists: Pastoral Tragicomedy -- 3 Women Writers and the Canon: Satyr Scenes and Female-Authored Pastoral Drama -- 4 Isabetta Coreglia's Dori (1634): Writing Pastoral Drama Against the Backdrop of the Male Canon and an Incipient Female-Authored Tradition -- 5 Isabetta Coreglia's Erindo il fido (1650) and Isabella Andreini's Mirtilla (1588): Using a Female-Authored Classic as Paradigm -- Appendix -- Bibliography -- Index

Pastoral Drama and Healing in Early Modern Italy represents the first full-length study to confront seriously the well-rehearsed analogy of the pastoral poet as healer. Usually associated with the edifying function of the Renaissance pastoral, this analogy, if engaged more profoundly, raises a number of questions that remain unanswered to this day. How does the pastoral heal? How exactly do the inner workings of the text cater to the healing? What socio-cultural conventions make the healing possible? What are the major problems that pastoral poetry as mimesis must overcome to make its healing morally legitimate? In the wake of Derrida's seminal work on the Platonic pharmakon, which has in turn led recent criticism to formulate a much more concrete understanding of the theater/drug analogy, the stringent approach to the therapeutic function of the Renaissance pastoral offered in this work provides a valuable critical tool to unpack the complexity contained within a little-understood cliché.

The first full length treatment of how men of different professions, social ranks and ages are empowered by their emotional expressiveness in early modern English literary works, this study examines the profound impact of the cultural shift in the English aristocracy from feudal warriors to emotionally expressive courtiers or gentlemen on all kinds of men in early modern English literature. Jennifer Vaught bases her analysis on the epic, lyric, and romance as well as on drama, pastoral writings and biography, by Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Jonson and Garrick among other writers. Offering new readings of these works, she traces the gradual emergence of men of feeling during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the blossoming of this literary version of manhood during the eighteenth century.

This is the first comprehensive study of sympathy in the early modern period, providing a deeply researched and interdisciplinary examination of its development in Anglophone literature and culture. It argues that the term sympathy was used to refer to an active and imaginative sharing of affect considerably earlier than previous critical and historical accounts have suggested. Investigating a wide range of texts and genres, including prose fiction, sermons, poetic complaint, drama, political tracts, and scientific treatises, Richard Meek demonstrates the ways in which sympathy in the period is bound up with larger debates about society, religion, and identity. He also reveals the extent to which early modern emotions were not simply humoral or grounded in the body, but rather relational, comparative, and intertextual. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Renaissance literature and history, the history of emotions, and the history and philosophy of science.

Eleven essays invite us to rethink not only what constitutes an environment but also where the environment ends and selfhood begins. The essays examine the dynamic and varied mediations early modern writers posited between microcosm and macrocosm, ranging from discourses on the ecology of passions to striking examples of distributed cognition.