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Title Representing the plague in early modern England / edited by Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman
Published New York : Routledge, 2011

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Description 1 online resource (vi, 260 pages) : illustrations
Series Routledge studies in Renaissance literature and culture ; 14
Routledge studies in Renaissance literature and culture ; 14.
Contents Making the plague serve form and function, 1563-1666. Writing the plague in English prose satire / William Kerwin; Plague space and played space in urban drama, 1604 / Kelly J. Stage; Physical and spiritual illness: narrative appropriations of the Bills of mortality / Erin Sullivan -- Governing bodies in plague-time. Contagious figurations: plague and the impenetrable nation after the death of Elizabeth / Richelle Munkhoff; "Thinking to pass unknown": Measure for measure, the plague, and the accession of James I / James D. Mardock -- Performances, playhouses, and the sites of re-creation. "Sweet recreation barred": the case for playgoing in plague-time / Nichole DeWall; Shakespeare's dual lexicons of plague: infections in speech and space / Paula S. Berggren; "A plague on both your houses": sites of comfort and terror in early modern drama / Barbara H. Traister -- Contemporary turns. Plague in A midsummer night's dream: a Girardian reading of Bottom and Hippolyta / Matthew Thiele; Dekker's and Middleton's plague pamphlets as environmental literature / Charles Whitney
Summary From the publisher. This collection offers readers a timely encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early modern writers transformed the plague into literature. The essays examine the impact of the plague on health, politics, and religion as well as on the plays, prose fiction, and plague bills that stand as witnesses to the experience of a society devastated by contagious disease. Readers will find physicians and moralists wrestling with the mysteries of the disease; erotic escapades staged in plague-time plays; the poignant prose works of William Bullein and Thomas Dekker; the bodies of monarchs who sought to protect themselves from plague; the chameleon-like nature of the plague as literal disease and as metaphor; and future strains of plague, literary and otherwise, which we may face in the globally-minded, technology-dependent, and ecologically-awakened twenty-first century. The bubonic plague compelled change in all aspects of lived experience in Early Modern England, but at the same time, it opened space for writers to explore new ideas and new literary forms -- not all of them somber or horrifying and some of them downright hilarious. By representing the plague for their audiences, these writers made an epidemic calamity intelligible: for them, the dreaded disease could signify despair but also hope, bewilderment but also a divine plan, quarantine but also liberty, death but also new life
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes English
Print version record
Subject English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism
Plague in literature.
Diseases and literature -- England -- History -- 17th century
Diseases and literature -- England -- History -- 16th century
Plague -- England -- History
Diseases in literature.
Medicine in literature.
Drama.
Medicine -- History -- 17th century.
Medicine in Literature
Drama
Plague -- history
History, 16th Century
History, 17th Century
plays (performing arts compositions)
drama (literary genre)
LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
Medicine in literature
Medicine
Drama
Diseases and literature
Diseases in literature
English literature -- Early modern
Plague
Plague in literature
Englisch
Literatur
Pest Motiv
Pest -- Motiv -- Englische Literatur.
Englische Literatur -- Motiv -- Pest.
Pest -- Grossbritannien -- Geschichte 16. Jh.
Pest -- Grossbritannien -- Geschichte 17. Jh.
Literatur.
Englisch.
Motiv.
Pest.
SUBJECT United Kingdom
Subject England
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History
Form Electronic book
Author Totaro, Rebecca Carol Noel, 1968-
Gilman, Ernest B., 1946-
LC no. 2009049213
ISBN 9780203850565
0203850564
9781136963247
1136963243
9781136963193
1136963197
9781136963230
1136963235
9780415634182
0415634180
1282781839
9781282781832
9786612781834
6612781831