English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama

by Mary Floyd-Wilson

Overview

Drawing on classical and contemporary medical texts, histories, and cosmographies, Mary Floyd-Wilson demonstrates that the Renaissance understanding of identities contradicted many modern stereotypes concerning racial and ethnic differences. English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries labored to reinvent ethnology to their own advantage, paving the way for the invention of more familiar racial ideas. Floyd-Wilson highlights these English revisionary efforts in her transformational readings of the period's drama; including Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Jonson's The Masque of Blackness, and Shakespeare's Othello and Cymbeline.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521810562
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/20/2003
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Mary Floyd-Wilson is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published articles in several journals including English Literary Renaissance, Women's Studies, and South Atlantic Review and is a contributing author to British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (2002). She is currently co-editing a volume of essays entitled Reading the Early Modern Passions: A Cultural History of Emotion, University of Pennsylvania Press (forthcoming).

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction: the marginal English; Part I. Climatic Culture: The Transmissions and Transmutations of Ethnographic Knowlege: 1. The ghost of Hippocrates: geohumoral history in the West; 2. British ethnology; 3. An inside story of race: melancholy and ethnology; Part II. The English Ethnographic Theatre: 4. Tamburlaine and the staging of white barbarity; 5. Temperature and temperance in Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness; 6. Othello's jealousy; 7. Cymbeline's angels; Notes; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"Making a contribution of the highest interest and importance to the growing field of early modern race studies, this book expands the scope of current inquiry by approaching from a new angle....Floyd-Wilson's complicated, multi-faceted argument challenges us to keep all of its strands in view. Her emphasis on transition makes her interpretive stance dynamic and far-reaching." Renaissance Quarterly

"Mary Floyd-Wilson's study of English ethnicity offers an important contribution to the study of race in the early modern period. Its account of geohumoral ethnology is innovative and fascinating." Seventeenth-Century News

From the Publisher