1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910455472703321

Autore

Davis Lloyd <1959-2005, >

Titolo

Guise and disguise : rhetoric and characterization in the English Renaissance / / Lloyd Davis

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Toronto, [Ontario] ; ; Buffalo, [New York] ; ; London, [England] : , : University of Toronto Press, , 1993

©1993

ISBN

1-282-01184-7

9786612011849

1-4426-7557-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (228 p.)

Disciplina

820.927

Soggetti

English literature - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History and criticism

English language - Early modern, 1500-1700 - Rhetoric

Disguise in literature

Characters and characteristics in literature

Renaissance - England

Rhetoric, Renaissance - England

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Disguise in the Renaissance -- Chapter One: The Rhetoric of Characterization -- Chapter Two: Political Acts -- Chapter Three: The Allegorical Subject -- Chapter Four: The Figure of Woman -- Epilogue: Tragedy and Disguise -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Disguise is a recurring figure in many Renaissance texts. In its apparent intention to deceive, it raises complex issues of identity, motivation, and the construction of character. Lloyd Davis's Guise and Disguise examines disguise as a rhetorical and dramatistic motif in a wide range of Renaissance texts. Drawing on the sociological analyses of character in the work of Goffmann and Garfinkel as well as on recent historicist studies of Renaissance literature, Davis argues against an essentialist notion of identity. He posits a counter-tradition of character as



invented, shaped guise, a cultural process realized through rhetorical and dramatic performance.Davis traces the conflict between idealist and cultural notions of selfhood fromits classical roots to its role as a key social concern in the English Renaissance. He analyses rhetorical texts from Wilson, Rainolds, Puttenham, and Sidney; the political and social philosophies of Machiavelli, Castiglione, Montaigne, Bacon, and Hobbes; the religious writings of Erasmus, Calvin, and Donne; and the dramatic works of Lyly, Shakespeare, Marston, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher. He sees issues of selfhood and identity as central to the period's ideological and gender discourses, and strategies of disguise and character-making as challenging the political and sexual motives that underlie imags of the essentialist self. Davis's approach links Renaissance culture both to its past and to modern and post-modern notions of subjectivity and language.