Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance seeks to address the representation of the humors from non-traditional, abstract, and materialist perspectives, considering the humorality of everyday objects, activities, and performance within the early modern period. To uncover how humoralism shapes textual, material, and aesthetic encounters for contemporary subjects in a broader sense than previous studies have pursued, the project brings together three principal areas of investigation: how the humoral body was evoked and embodied within the space of the early modern stage; how the materiality of an object can be understood as constructed within humoral discourse; and how individuals’ activities and pursuits can connote specific practices informed by humoralism. Across the book, contributors explore how diverse media and cultural practices are informed by humoralism. As a whole, the collection investigates alternative humoralities in order to illuminate both early modern works of art as well as the cultural moments of their production.

This Element turns to the stage to ask a simple question about gender and affect: what causes the shame of the early modern rape victim? Beneath honour codes and problematic assumptions about consent, the answer lies in affect, disgust. It explores both the textual "performance" of affect, how literary language works to evoke emotions and the ways disgust can work in theatrical performance. Here Shakespeare's poem The Rape of Lucrece is the classic paradigm of sexual pollution and shame, where disgust's irrational logic of contamination leaves the raped wife in a permanent state of uncleanness that spreads from body to soul. Staging Disgust offers alternatives to this depressing trajectory: Middleton's Women Beware Women and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus perform disgust with a difference, deploying the audience's revulsion to challenge the assumption that a raped woman should "naturally" feel intolerable shame.

Bringing together scholars from different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, this multidisciplinary Handbook offers a comprehensive critical overview of intoxicants and intoxication. The Handbook is divided into 34 chapters across eight thematic sections covering a wide range of issues, including the meanings of intoxicants; the social life of intoxicants; intoxication settings; intoxication practices; alternative approaches to the study of intoxication; scapegoated intoxicants; discourses shaping intoxication; and changing notions of excess. It explores a range of different intoxicants, including alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, and legal and illicit drugs, including amphetamine, cannabis, ecstasy, khat, methadone, and opiates. Chapter length case studies explore these intoxicants in a variety of countries, including the USA, the UK, Australia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Denmark, Ireland, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Singapore, and Sweden, across a broad timespan covering the nineteenth century to the present day. This wide-ranging Handbook will be of great interest to researchers, students, and instructors within the humanities and social sciences with an interest in a wide range of different intoxicants and different intoxication practices. Chapters 15 and 31 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Belief in spirits, demons and the occult was commonplace in the early modern period, as was the view that these forces could be used to manipulate nature and produce new knowledge. In this groundbreaking study, Mary Floyd-Wilson explores these beliefs in relation to women and scientific knowledge, arguing that the early modern English understood their emotions and behavior to be influenced by hidden sympathies and antipathies in the natural world. Focusing on Twelfth Night, Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, All's Well That Ends Well, The Changeling and The Duchess of Malfi, she demonstrates how these plays stage questions about whether women have privileged access to nature's secrets and whether their bodies possess hidden occult qualities. Discussing the relationship between scientific discourse and the occult, she goes on to argue that as experiential evidence gained scientific ground, women's presumed intimacy with nature's secrets was either diminished or demonized.

The grotesque - the exagggerated, the deformed, the monstrous - has been a well-considered subject for students of comparative literature and art. In a major addition to the literature of art, cultural criticism and feminist studies, Mary Russo re-examines the grotesque in the light of gender, exploring the works of Angela Carter David Cronenberg Bahktin Kristeva Freud Zizek. Mary Russo looks at the portrayal of the grotesque in Western culture and by combining the iconographic and the historical, locates the role of the woman's body in the discourse of the grotesque.

This transhistorical, international and interdisciplinary work will be of interest to students, theater professionals and Shakespeare scholars.

This book focuses on the “dark side” of stand-up comedy, initially inspired by speculations surrounding the death of comedian Robin Williams. Contributors, those who study humor as well as those who perform comedy, join together to contemplate the paradoxical relationship between tragedy and comedy and expose over-generalizations about comic performers’ troubled childhoods, addictions, and mental illnesses. The book is divided into two sections. First, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore comedians’ onstage performances, their offstage lives, and the relationship between the two. The second half of the book focuses on amateur and lesser-known professional comedians who reveal the struggles they face as they attempt to hone successful comedy acts and likable comic personae. The goal of this collection is to move beyond the hackneyed stereotype of the sad clown in order to reveal how stand-up comedy can transform both personal and collective tragedies by providing catharsis through humor.