Imagining Culture: Essays in Early Modern History and Literature(Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies)

This book of original essays explores three important areas in comparative literature and history and in cultural studies: the boundaries between history and fiction;women as writers and subjects; and the connection between the early modern, modern and postmodern. New history and new literary studies look at innovative ways to see past cultures in a new light. Traditional methods are used to new ends and writers who are familiar within their cultures are translated to other cultures. This study promotes an expanded understanding of our cultural artifacts in a rapidly changing present. It discusses English-speaking culture in the early modern period in the context of other European cultures and relates Europe to other parts of the world, most notably America. After grounding the discussion of culture in history, identity, dialogue as a genre that crosses the boundaries between philosophy and fiction, the rhetoric of prefaces to historical collections, cosmographies and histories that share something with the techniques of literary and forensic rhetoric, the book proceeds to discuss two central issues in cultural studies today: gender and postmodernity. The final section of the book provides a general assessment through early modern texts of modernity and postmodernity.

Table of Contents:
Imagining Culture: Crossing Boundaries in Early Modern Europe, Jonathan Hart * History, Fiction, and the Human Sciences : History and Anthropology, and the History of Anthropology: Considerations on a Methodological Practice, Anthony Pagden * The emergency of the Paradoxical Self, Eva Kushner * Sperone Speroni and the Labyrinthine Discourse of Renaissance Dialogue, Olga Zorzi Pugliese * Strategies of Promotion: Some Prefatory Matter of Oviedo, Thevet, and Hakluyt, Jonathan Hart * Gender and Representation : My Honour I'll Bequeath unto the Knife: Public Heroism, Private Sacrifice, and Early Modern Rapes of Lucrece, Mercedes Maroto Camino * Pour une po tique de la nouvelle, Gis le Mathieu-Castellani * Speaking Politically Correct in the Feminine Voice: Examples from the Decameron and the Heptam ron, Sylvie L.F. RichardsEarly Modernity/Modernity/Postmodernity Cervantes et Tirso face aux performatifs: Don Quichotte et Don Juan, Antonio G-mez-MorianaConcerning Ariosto's Modernity: Alcina's Case, M ssimo Verdicchio * Challenging the Order of the Sun in G-ngora's Soledades, Rachel SchmidtShowing and Telling: An Essay on Narrative Theory and Renaissance Drama, Elizabeth M. Richmond-GarzaBibliography

Review :
"The sheer range of its subjects and methodologies and the high quality of its scholarship are suggestive of the many 'New Worlds' open to those working in the Renaissance and the human sciences today." -- Canadian Review of Comparative Literature