Literature and the Idea of Luxury in Early Modern England
Title | Literature and the Idea of Luxury in Early Modern England PDF eBook |
Author | Alison V. Scott |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 271 |
Release | 2016-05-06 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1317104374 |
Exploring the idea of luxury in relation to a series of neighboring but distinct concepts including avarice, excess, licentiousness, indulgence, vitality, abundance, and waste, this study combines intellectual and cultural historical methods to trace discontinuities in luxury’s conceptual development in seventeenth-century England. The central argument is that, as ’luxury’ was gradually Englished in seventeenth-century culture, it developed political and aesthetic meanings that connect with eighteenth-century debates even as they oppose their so-called demoralizing thrust. Alison Scott closely examines the meanings of luxury in early modern English culture through literary and rhetorical uses of the idea. She argues that, while ’luxury’ could and often did denote merely ’lust’ or ’licentiousness’ as it tends to be glossed by modern editors of contemporary works, its cultural lexicon was in fact more complex and fluid than that at this time. Moreover, that fuller understanding of its plural and shifting meanings-as they are examined here-has implications for the current intellectual history of the idea in Western thought. The existing narrative of luxury’s conceptual development is one of progressive upward transformation, beginning with the rise of economic liberalism amidst eighteenth-century debates; it is one that assumes essential continuity between the medieval treatment of luxury as the sin of ’luxuria’ and early modern notions of the idea even as social practises of luxury explode in early seventeenth-century culture.
Literature and the Idea of Luxury in Early Modern England
Title | Literature and the Idea of Luxury in Early Modern England PDF eBook |
Author | Alison V. Scott |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 246 |
Release | 2016-05-06 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1317104382 |
Exploring the idea of luxury in relation to a series of neighboring but distinct concepts including avarice, excess, licentiousness, indulgence, vitality, abundance, and waste, this study combines intellectual and cultural historical methods to trace discontinuities in luxury’s conceptual development in seventeenth-century England. The central argument is that, as ’luxury’ was gradually Englished in seventeenth-century culture, it developed political and aesthetic meanings that connect with eighteenth-century debates even as they oppose their so-called demoralizing thrust. Alison Scott closely examines the meanings of luxury in early modern English culture through literary and rhetorical uses of the idea. She argues that, while ’luxury’ could and often did denote merely ’lust’ or ’licentiousness’ as it tends to be glossed by modern editors of contemporary works, its cultural lexicon was in fact more complex and fluid than that at this time. Moreover, that fuller understanding of its plural and shifting meanings-as they are examined here-has implications for the current intellectual history of the idea in Western thought. The existing narrative of luxury’s conceptual development is one of progressive upward transformation, beginning with the rise of economic liberalism amidst eighteenth-century debates; it is one that assumes essential continuity between the medieval treatment of luxury as the sin of ’luxuria’ and early modern notions of the idea even as social practises of luxury explode in early seventeenth-century culture.
Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England
Title | Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England PDF eBook |
Author | Anne M. Myers |
Publisher | JHU Press |
Total Pages | 267 |
Release | 2013-01-01 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1421408007 |
Our built environment inspires writers to reflect on the human experience, discover its history, or make it up. Buildings tell stories. Castles, country homes, churches, and monasteries are “documents” of the people who built them, owned them, lived and died in them, inherited and saved or destroyed them, and recorded their histories. Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England examines the relationship between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architectural and literary works. By becoming more sensitive to the narrative functions of architecture, Anne M. Myers argues, we begin to understand how a range of writers viewed and made use of the material built environment that surrounded the production of early modern texts in England. Scholars have long found themselves in the position of excusing or explaining England’s failure to achieve the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance in the visual arts. Myers proposes that architecture inspired an unusual amount of historiographic and literary production, including poetry, drama, architectural treatises, and diaries. Works by William Camden, Henry Wotton, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Anne Clifford, and John Evelyn, when considered as a group, are texts that overturn the engrained critical notion that a Protestant fear of idolatry sentenced the visual arts and architecture in England to a state of suspicion and neglect.
Prodigality in Early Modern Drama
Title | Prodigality in Early Modern Drama PDF eBook |
Author | Ezra Horbury |
Publisher | Boydell & Brewer |
Total Pages | 299 |
Release | 2019 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN | 1843845423 |
Examination of the motif of the prodigal son as treated in early modern drama, from Shakespeare to Beaumont and Fletcher.
The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature
Title | The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature PDF eBook |
Author | Peter Remien |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 237 |
Release | 2019-02-14 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 1108496814 |
Participates in an intellectual history of ecology while prompting a re-evaluation of nature in the early modern period.
The Idea of Luxury
Title | The Idea of Luxury PDF eBook |
Author | Christopher J. Berry |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 294 |
Release | 1994-06-16 |
Genre | Business & Economics |
ISBN | 9780521466912 |
This book analyses the idea of luxury, shows how its evaluative meaning has changed, and explores its role in the determination of social order.
Early Modern England
Title | Early Modern England PDF eBook |
Author | J. A. Sharpe |
Publisher | Hodder Education |
Total Pages | 379 |
Release | 1987-01-01 |
Genre | Angleterre - Conditions sociales |
ISBN | 9780713165128 |