Sympathy in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-1-009-28026-6
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 298 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 576 g

This is the first comprehensive study of sympathy in the early modern period, providing a deeply researched and interdisciplinary examination of its development in Anglophone literature and culture. It argues that the term sympathy was used to refer to an active and imaginative sharing of affect considerably earlier than previous critical and historical accounts have suggested. Investigating a wide range of texts and genres, including prose fiction, sermons, poetic complaint, drama, political tracts, and scientific treatises, Richard Meek demonstrates the ways in which sympathy in the period is bound up with larger debates about society, religion, and identity. He also reveals the extent to which early modern emotions were not simply humoral or grounded in the body, but rather relational, comparative, and intertextual. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Renaissance literature and history, the history of emotions, and the history and philosophy of science.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meek, Richard

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: 'Solemn sympathy'; 1. 'A sympathy of affections': sympathy, love and friendship in Elizabethan prose fiction; 2. 'Compassion and mercie draw teares from the godlyfull often': the rhetoric of sympathy in the early modern sermon; 3. 'Grief best is pleased with grief's society': female complaint and the transmission of sympathy; 4. 'O, what a sympathy of woe is this': passionate sympathy in late Elizabethan drama; 5. 'Soveraignes have a sympathie with subjects': the politics of sympathy in Jacobean England; 6. 'As God loves sympathy, God loves symphony': sympathy at a distance in Caroline England Coda.

Über Autor(innen)

Meek, Richard
Richard Meek is Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. He is the author of Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (2009) and co-editor of Shakespeare's Book: Essays in Reading, Writing and Reception (2008), The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2015), and Ekphrastic Encounters: New Interdisciplinary Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (2019).