Untimely matter in the time of Shakespeare [[electronic resource] /] / Jonathan Gil Harris

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910812880903321
• Autore: Harris Jonathan Gil
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Philadelphia, : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2009
• ISBN: 1-283-21169-6; 9786613211699; 0-8122-0220-1
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (289 p.)
• Disciplina: 820.9/003
• Soggetti: English literature - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History and criticism - Theory, etc; Literature and history - Great Britain - History; Literature and society - Great Britain - History; Great Britain History 1066-1687 Historiography
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. [235]-259) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Reading matter : George Herbert and the East-West palimpsests of The temple -- Performing history : East-West palimpsests in William Shakespeare's second Henriad -- The writing on the wall : London's old Jewry and John Stow's urban palimpsest -- The smell of gunpowder : Macbeth and the palimpsests of olfaction -- Touching matters : Margaret Cavendish's and Hélène Cixous's palimpsested bodies -- Crumpled handkerchiefs : William Shakespeare's and Michel Serres's palimpsested time.
• Sommario/riassunto: Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title The New Historicism of the 1980's and early 1990's was preoccupied with the fashioning of early modern subjects. But, Jonathan Gil Harris notes, the pronounced tendency now is to engage with objects. From textiles to stage beards to furniture, objects are read by literary critics as closely as literature used to be. For a growing number of Renaissance and Shakespeare scholars, the play is no longer the thing: the thing is the thing. Curiously, the current wave of "thing studies" has largely avoided posing questions of time. How do we understand time through ; a thing? What is the time of a thing? In Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Harris challenges the ways we conventionally understand physical objects and their relation to history. Turning to Renaissance theories of matter, Harris considers the profound untimeliness of things, focusing particularly on Shakespeare's stage materials. He reveals that many "Renaissance" objects were actually survivals from an older time-the medieval monastic properties that, post-Reformation, were recycled as stage props in the public playhouses, or the old Roman walls of London, still visible in Shakespeare's time. Then, as now, old objects were inherited, recycled, repurposed; they were polytemporal or palimpsested. By treating matter as dynamic and temporally hybrid, Harris addresses objects in their futurity, not just in their encapsulation of the past. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare is a bold study that puts the matériel-the explosive, world-changing potential-back into a "material culture" that has been too often understood as inert stuff.