Immateriality and Early Modern English Literature: Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert

by James A. Knapp

Overview

Examines literary engagement with immateriality since the ‘material turn’ in early modern studies
Provides six case studies of works by Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert, offering new readings of important literary texts of the English Renaissance alongside detailed chapters outlining attitudes towards immateriality in works of natural philosophy, medicine, and theologyEmploys an innovative organization around three major areas in which problem of immaterial was particularly pitched: Ontology, Theology, and Psychology (or Being, Believing, and Thinking)Includes wide-ranging references to early modern literary, philosophical, and theological textsDemonstrates how innovations in natural philosophy influenced thought about the natural world and how it was portrayed in literatureEngages with current early modern scholarship in the areas of material culture, cognitive literary studies, and phenomenology

Immateriality and Early Modern English Literature explores how early modern writers responded to rapidly shifting ideas about the interrelation of their natural and spiritual worlds. It provides six case studies of works by Shakespeare, Donne and Herbert, offering new readings of important literary texts of the English Renaissance alongside detailed chapters outlining attitudes towards immateriality in works of natural philosophy, medicine and theology. Building on the importance of addressing material culture in order to understand early modern literature, Knapp demonstrates how the literary imagination was shaped by changing attitudes toward the immaterial realm.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474457118
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	03/03/2022
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy
Pages:	440
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.91(d)

About the Author

James A. Knapp is Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in the English Department at Loyola UniversityChicago. His work focuses on the intersections of philosophy, literature, and visual culture in early modern Britain. He is the author of Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England (2003) and Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser (2011), and his essays on early modern literature and culture have appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, ELH, Criticism, and numerous essay collections.

Table of Contents

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Shakespeare’s Naught

1. Immateriality and the Language of Things

Part One: Being

2. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth’: Material and Immaterial Substance and Early Modern Ontology3. ‘For I must nothing be’: Richard II and the Immateriality of Self4. ‘’Tis insensible then?’: Concept and Action in 1 Henry IV

Part Two: Believing

5. The Visible and the Invisible: Seeing the Earthly—Believing the Spiritual6. ‘When though knowest this, thou knowest’: Intention, Intuition, and Temporality in Donne’s Anatomy of the World7. ‘a brittle crazy glass’: George Herbert and the Experience of the Divine

Part Three: Thinking

8. Cognition and its Objects, or Ideas and the Substance of Spirit(s)9. ‘Thinking makes it so’: Mind, Body, and Spirit in The Rape of Lucrece, Hamlet, and Much Ado About Nothing10. ‘Neither Fish nor Flesh, nor Good Red Herring’: Phenomenality, Representation, and Experience in The Tempest

Coda

What People are Saying About This

Rutgers University Henry S. Turner

Cutting an elegant line among literature, the philosophy of religion and historical phenomenology, Knapp has composed a highly intelligent account of what it meant for early moderns to think, to know and to believe anything, not only about the material world of things and institutions but about the immaterial, invisible, or hidden dimensions to lived experience. An utterly fresh, inspiring study.

Editorial Reviews

For those with an interest in the early modern period’s negotiations of alternative, sometimes contradictory, forms of knowledge, Immateriality and Early Modern English Literature is an indispensable resource. Knapp’s monograph is to be admired for its careful philological excavations and close reading of a vast intellectual tradition that was so readily apparent to early modern thinkers.

Reformation - Katherine Walker

Cutting an elegant line among literature, the philosophy of religion and historical phenomenology, Knapp has composed a highly intelligent account of what it meant for early moderns to think, to know and to believe anything, not only about the material world of things and institutions but about the immaterial, invisible, or hidden dimensions to lived experience. An utterly fresh, inspiring study.

Henry S. Turner