Temporality, Genre and Experience in the Age of Shakespeare - by Lauren Shohet (Hardcover)

About the Book

Focusing on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, these original essays by leading scholars explore how theatrical, aesthetic, and linguistic forms engage early modern experiences of temporality. Encompassing comedy, tragedy, history, and romance, some contributions consider how different models of pastness, presentness, sequentiality, memory, and historical meaning underwrite particular representational practices. Others, conversely, investigate how aesthetic forms afforded diverse ways for early-modern people to understand or experience time - and how this can impact us today.

Book Synopsis

Focusing on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, these original essays by leading scholars explore how theatrical, aesthetic, and linguistic forms engage early modern experiences of temporality.

Encompassing comedy, tragedy, history, and romance, some contributions consider how different models of pastness, presentness, sequentiality, memory, and historical meaning underwrite particular representational practices. Others, conversely, investigate how aesthetic forms afforded diverse ways for early-modern people to understand or experience time - and how this can impact us today.

Review Quotes

"A luminous collection of essays that explore Shakespeare's capacity to score time like music." - Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

About the Author

Lauren Shohet is Luckow Family Professor of English at Villanova University, USA and the author of Reading Masques: The English Masque and Public Culture in the Seventeenth Century (2010). Her writing on early modern poetry, drama, and form has focused on Milton, Marvell, Jonson, and Shakespeare, appearing in such journals as Poetics Today, Milton Studies, Shakespeare Studies, the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, and the Yearbook of English Studies. She is coeditor of Gathering Force: British Literature in Transition 1557-1623 and of the first volume of the forthcoming three-volume British Literature in Transition 1557-1680 (general editor Stephen Dobranski, 2017). She has held fellowships and appointments from the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA), the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (Germany).