Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Toronto Press
Published:16th Oct '19
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
In the decades before history was institutionalized as a scholarly discipline, historical writing was practiced variously by poets, record keepers, lawyers, sermonizers, mythologizers, and philosophers. In this welter of competing forms of historical thought, early modern drama often operated as a site in which claims about the nature of historical change could be treated in a frequently conflicting manner.
To explore this arena of competing forms of historical explanation, Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama focuses on the problem of narrative abruption in a selection of historically minded early modern plays as they rely on various strategies to make sense of biography and fatality. Arguing that narrative forms fail in the face of untimely death, Andrew Griffin shows that the disruption appears as a matter of trauma, making the untimely death both a point of narrative conflict and a social problem. Exploring the formula that early modern dramatists used to make sense of life and death, this book draws on the wider context of this period’s culture of historical writing.
"English Renaissance scholars will find Andrew Griffin’s book an agreeable re-visioning of some familiar plays, while it brings attention to some neglected plays. It’s also an intriguing approach to late Elizabethan and Jacobean drama."
-- Margaret Rose Jaster, Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg * Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme *"Andrew Griffin’s deeply learned and painstakingly written book argues that early modern drama participates in or functions as a form of early modern historiography, one in which the competing forms of memorializing human lives and deaths common to this transitional period of history writing ‘abrupt’ the dramatic narration."
-- Yvonne Bruce * Studies in Medieval and Renaissance TeachingISBN: 9781487503482
Dimensions: 235mm x 159mm x 19mm
Weight: 470g
208 pages