Listening to what she terms 'unruly pirate voices' in early modern
English literature, in this study Claire Jowitt offers an original
and compelling analysis of the cultural meanings of 'piracy'. By
examining the often marginal figure of the pirate (and also the
sometimes hard-to-distinguish privateer) Jowitt shows how flexibly
these figures served to comment on English nationalism,
international relations, and contemporary politics. She considers
the ways in which piracy can, sometimes in surprising and
resourceful ways, overlap and connect with, rather than simply
challenge, some of the foundations underpinning Renaissance
orthodoxies-absolutism, patriarchy, hierarchy of birth, and the
superiority of Europeans and the Christian religion over other
peoples and belief systems. Jowitt's discussion ranges over a
variety of generic forms including public drama, broadsheets and
ballads, prose romance, travel writing, and poetry from the
fifty-year period stretching across the reigns of three English
monarchs: Elizabeth Tudor, and James and Charles Stuart. Among the
early modern writers whose works are analyzed are Heywood, Hakluyt,
Shakespeare, Sidney, and Wroth; and among the multifaceted
historical figures discussed are Francis Drake, John Ward, Henry
Mainwaring, Purser and Clinton. What she calls the 'semantics of
piracy' introduces a rich symbolic vein in which these figures,
operating across different cultural registers and appealing to
audiences in multiple ways, represent and reflect many changing
discourses, political and artistic, in early modern England. The
first book-length study to look at the cultural impact of
Renaissance piracy, The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630 underlines how
the figure of the Renaissance pirate was not only sensational, but
also culturally significant. Despite its transgressive nature,
piracy also comes to be seen as one of the key mechanisms which
served to connect peoples and regions during this period.
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