Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture: Hamlet, The Faerie Queene, and Arcadia

by Judith Owens

Overview

This book is notable for bringing together humanist schooling and familial instruction under the banner of emotions and for studying seminal works of early modern literature within this new analytical context. It thus furnishes unique ways to think about two closely interrelated moral imperatives: shaping boys into civil subjects; and fashioning heroic agency and selfhood in literature. In tracing the emotional dynamics of the humanist classroom, this book shows just how thoroughly school could accommodate resistance to authority and foster unruly boys. In gauging the emotional pressures at work in filial relationships, it shows how profoundly sons could experience patriarchal authority as provisional, negotiable, or damaging. In turning to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Spenser’s Prince Arthur, and Sidney’s Arcadian heroes, Emotional Settings highlights the ways in which the respective emotional and moral imperatives of home and school could bring conflicting pressures to bear in the formation of heroic agency – and at what cost. Engaging and accessible, this book will appeal to scholars interested in early modern literature, pedagogy, histories of emotion, and histories of the family, as well as to graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in these fields.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030431488
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	05/31/2020
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	218
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Judith Owens is Professor of English at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, where her research and teaching focus on the literature and culture of the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. She is the author of a monograph, Enabling Engagements: Edmund Spenser and the Poetics of Patronage (2002), and articles and book chapters on Spenser and on Walter Ralegh. She is co-editor, with Glenn Clark and Greg Smith, of City Limits: Perspectives on the Historical European City (2010).

Table of Contents

1. Chapter One: Discipline and Resistance in the Schoolroom: Emotional Possibilities.- 2. Chapter Two: Paternal Authority in the Home: Emotional Negotiations.- 3. Chapter Three: Sidney and Heroic Paideia.- 4. Chapter Four: Learning and Loss in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.- 5. Chapters Five: Familial Feeling and Humanist Habits of Intellection in Hamlet.- 6. Chapter Six: Familial Imperatives and Humanist Habits of Intellection in Hamlet.-

Editorial Reviews

Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture: ‘Hamlet’, ‘The Faerie Queene’, and ‘Arcadia’ is an innovative study of these seminal works of early modern literature. … Owens offers fresh perspectives on these issues, suggesting the potential to read a range of early modern texts in new ways via this approach.” (Edel Lamb, The Spenser Review, March 1, 2021)

From the Publisher