Memories of War in Early Modern England, 1st ed. 2016
Armor and Militant Nostalgia in Marlowe, Sidney, and Shakespeare
Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700 Series

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Language: English

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Memories of War in Early Modern England
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105.49 €

In Print (Delivery period: 15 days).

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Memories of War in Early Modern England
Publication date:
Support: Print on demand
This book examines literary depictions of the construction and destruction of the armored male body in combat in relation to early modern English understandings of the past. Bringing together the fields of material culture and militarism, Susan Harlan argues that the notion of ?spoiling? ? or the sanctioned theft of the arms and armor of the vanquished in battle ? provides a way of thinking about England?s relationship to its violent cultural inheritance. She demonstrates how writers reconstituted the spoils of antiquity and the Middle Ages in an imagined military struggle between male bodies. An analysis of scenes of arming and disarming across texts by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and tributes to Sir Philip Sidney reveals a pervasive militant nostalgia: a cultural fascination with moribund models and technologies of war. Readers will not only gain a better understanding of humanism but also a new way of thinking about violence and cultural production in Renaissance England.

CHAPTER 1 – “Objects fit for Tamburlaine”: Self-Arming in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Robert Vaughan’s Portraits, and The Almain Armourer’s Album.- INTERLUDE – Epic Pastness: War Stories, Nostalgic Objects, and Sexual and Textual Spoils in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage.- 

CHAPTER 2 – Spoiling Sir Philip Sidney: Mourning and Military Violence in the Elegies, Lant’s Roll, and Greville’s Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney.-INTERLUDE – “Scatter’d Men”: Mutilated Male Bodies and Conflicting Narratives of Militant Nostalgia in Shakespeare’s Henry V.- 

CHAPTER 3 – The Armored Body as Trophy: The Problem of the Roman Subject in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus.- CODA – “Let’s Do’t After the High Roman Fashion”: Funeral and Triumph.- BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Susan E. Harlan is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Wake Forest University, USA.
Provides a compelling argument for the need to re-think the status of armor, spoils, and trophies in relation to early modern cultural memory Turns to visual culture with a level of attentiveness to detail that is unprecedented in prior analyses of early modern military texts Deploys a breadth of critical perspectives by relevant early modern scholars such as Peter Stallybrass, Jonathan Gil Harris, and Heather James, as well as theorists like Derrida and Benjamin.