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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Racial Poetics: Early Modern Race And The Form Of Comedy, Yunah Kae Sep 2022

Racial Poetics: Early Modern Race And The Form Of Comedy, Yunah Kae

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation writes a premodern history of race as an alternative literary history of comedy. This project argues that early modern generic changes in comic conventions reflect and produce a logic of race, which assign relational positions of knowingness and unknowing as naturally immutable. Renaissance comedies resembled epistemological laboratories in which to theorize the notion of knowledge itself, and the comedies of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Dekker, Middleton, and Rowley abound in theatrical technologies which create and explore differences in knowing and ignorance. Blackened skin function as a signifier of preclusion from the humanist knowledge-reservoir of “poesy”; the foreign stink wafting …


Negotiating Space: Spatial Violation On The Early Modern Stage, 1587-1638, Gregory W. Sargent Sep 2021

Negotiating Space: Spatial Violation On The Early Modern Stage, 1587-1638, Gregory W. Sargent

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent criticism proves the malleability of theatrical space as a lens through which the discussion of Renaissance drama proliferates. Negotiating Space works towards the articulation of the importance of space in the representational mimesis of performance by examining moments of violence, violation, misuse, and misappropriation. I draw a connection between the lived, material sites of the plays’ action and the ideological import of representing those spaces dramatically using a focus on violation. Though much good scholarship exists detailing London-centric approaches to dramatic space, this study discursively reifies identifiable staged spaces to connect with the lives of theatrical patrons no matter …