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The Renaissance of emotion: Understanding affect in Shakespeare and his contemporaries

Online ISBN:
9781781708866
Print ISBN:
9780719090783
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Book

The Renaissance of emotion: Understanding affect in Shakespeare and his contemporaries

Richard Meek (ed.),
Richard Meek
(ed.)

Lecturer in English

University of Hull
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Erin Sullivan (ed.)
Erin Sullivan
(ed.)

Lecturer and Fellow in the Shakespeare Institute

University of Birmingham
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Published online:
21 January 2016
Published in print:
1 July 2015
Online ISBN:
9781781708866
Print ISBN:
9780719090783
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

Abstract

This collection of essays offers a major reassessment of the meaning and significance of emotional experience in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Recent scholarship on early modern emotion has relied on a medical-historical approach, resulting in a picture of emotional experience that stresses the dominance of the material, humoral body. The Renaissance of Emotion seeks to redress this balance by examining the ways in which early modern texts explore emotional experience from perspectives other than humoral medicine. The chapters in the book seek to demonstrate how open, creative and agency-ridden the experience and interpretation of emotion could be. Taken individually, the chapters offer much-needed investigations into previously overlooked areas of emotional experience and signification; taken together, they offer a thorough re-evaluation of the cultural priorities and phenomenological principles that shaped the understanding of the emotive self in the early modern period. The Renaissance of Emotion will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, the history of emotion, theatre and cultural history, and the history of ideas.

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