Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617: The Anti-Poetics of Theater and Print

by Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast, James Daybell, Adam Smyth

Overview

This is the first full-length study to consider railing plays and pamphlets as a literary mode of articulation that vehemently counters dominant literary discourse of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period. Where previous scholarship has examined railing texts in isolation from each other, this book changes the way that we look at the English literary landscape by considering railing as a dominant and coherent literary movement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781409479390
Publisher:	Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Publication date:	05/28/2013
Series:	Material Readings in Early Modern Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast is Assistant Professor of English, The College of Wooster, USA.

Table of Contents

Preface; Introduction: Railing, Reviling, Invective; Chapter 1 The Queer Poetics of the Marprelate Controversy; Chapter 2 The Promiscuous Parthenogenesis of the Nashe-Harvey Pamphlets; Chapter 3 Theaters of Envy: The Poetomachia and Troilus and Cressida; Chapter 4 Aristocratic Remains: Coriolanus and Timon of Athens; Chapter 5 Dogges, Verse, and Effeminate Men: The Misandronic Railings of Anger, Sharp, and Munda; Conclusion;

Editorial Reviews

'Prendergast's focus on the poetics of railing brings together texts and episodes in English literary history-the Marprelate Controversy, the Harvey-Nashe quarrel, the war of the theaters, anti-feminist pamphlets-and reclaims their literary energy and importance. Behind the aggressive language of vituperation, degraded sexuality and hate is an experimental literary community playing with aesthetic boundaries in relation to the novel spaces of the professional stage and the printed pamphlet. This is an important book that captures the generative queerness of railing language and of the bonds between railing writers.' Alexandra Halasz, Dartmouth College, USA '... Prendergast’s text offers fresh insights that show how the intersections of print and theater culture create a common site of aesthetic crisis and invites further conversation surrounding its analogues in the sociohistorical upheavals at the turn of the seventeenth century.' Renaissance Quarterly 'Prendergast has written an interesting book that will connect with the work of many scholars. Indeed, the facility with which Prendergast moves from critic to critic, building on their various insights, is impressive and can offer a critical guide for those interested in pursuing this subject further.' Comparative Drama '... this is a lucidly argued and consistently interesting book about the literary and social forms that railing can take.' Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 ’...certainly an ambitious and interesting study of a remarkable cultural phenomenon.’ SHARP News '... Prendergast excels in unpacking textual evidence, plumbing various perverse definitions and unexpected shadings of metaphor in tracts and plays. She engages topicality, as studies of railing and satire must, but is not bound by such constraints, a freedom that allows her excellent etymological and analytical work to open up these difficult texts for readers, allowing them to understand the multifarious possibilities of meanin

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