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Chaos is a perennial source of fear and fascination. The original
"formless void" (tohu-wa-bohu) mentioned in the book of Genesis,
chaos precedes the created world: a state of anarchy before the
establishment of cosmic order. But chaos has frequently also been
conceived of as a force that persists in the cosmos and in society
and threatens to undo them both. From the cultures of the ancient
Near East and the Old Testament to early modernity, notions of the
divine have included the power to check and contain as well as to
unleash chaos as a sanction for the violation of social and ethical
norms. Yet chaos has also been construed as a necessary supplement
to order, a region of pure potentiality at the base of reality that
provides the raw material of creation or even constitutes a kind of
alternative order itself. As such, it generates its own peculiar
'formations of the formless'. Focusing on the connection between
the cosmic and the political, this volume traces the continuities
and re-conceptualizations of chaos from the ancient Near East to
early modern Europe across a variety of cultures, discourses and
texts. One of the questions it poses is how these pre-modern 'chaos
theories' have survived into and reverberate in our own time.
Anthropology is a notoriously polysemous term. Within a continental
European academic context, it is usually employed in the sense of
philosophical anthropology, and mainly concerned with exploring
concepts of a universal human nature. By contrast, Anglo-American
scholarship almost exclusively associates anthropology with the
investigation of cultural and ethnic differences (cultural
anthropology). How these two main traditions (and their
'derivations' such as literary anthropology, historical
anthropology, ethnology, ethnography, intercultural studies) relate
to each other is a matter of debate. Both, however, have their
roots in the path-breaking changes that occurred within sixteenth
and early seventeenth-century culture and scientific discourse. It
was in fact during this period that the term anthropology first
acquired the meanings on which its current usage is based. The
Renaissance did not 'invent' the human. But the period that gave
rise to 'humanism' witnessed an unprecedented diversification of
the concept that was at its very core. The question of what defines
the human became increasingly contested as new developments like
the emergence of the natural sciences, religious pluralisation, as
well as colonial expansion, were undermining old certainties. The
proliferation of doctrines of the human in the early modern age
bears out the assumption that anthropology is a discipline of
crisis, seeking to establish sets of common values and discursive
norms in situations when authority finds itself under pressure.
The essays reflect the work of a broad spectrum of disciplines in
humanities and cultural studies. They present a new vision of the
early modern era, which attempts to register the diverse and
contradictory nature of early modern culture, transcending
unambiguous notions of development such as modernization or
secularization. "
The volume analyses some of the travelling and bridge-building
activities that went on in Renaissance Europe, mainly but not
exclusively across the Channel, true to Montaigne's epoch-making
program of describing 'the passage'. Its emphasis on
Anglo-Continental relations ensures a firm basis in English
literature, but its particular appeal lies in its European point of
view, and in the perspectives it opens up into other areas of early
modern culture, such as pictorial art, philosophy, and economics.
The multiple implications of the go-between concept make for
structured diversity. The chapters of this book are arranged in
three stages. Part 1 ('Mediators') focuses on influential
go-betweens, both as groups, like the translators, and as
individual mediators. The second part of this book ('Mediations')
is concerned with individual acts of mediation, and with the
'mental topographies' they presuppose, reflect and redraw in their
turn. Part 3 ('Representations') looks at the role of exemplary
intermediaries and the workings of mediation represented on the
early modern English stage. Key features High quality anthology on
phenomena of cultural exchange in the Renaissance era With
contributions by outstanding international experts
Selected contributions to the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress,
which took place in July 2011 in Prague, represent the contemporary
state of Shakespeare studies in thirty-eight countries worldwide.
Apart from readings of Shakespeare's plays and poems, more than
forty chapters map Renaissance contexts of his art in politics,
theater, law, or material culture and discuss numerous cases of the
impact of his works in global culture from the Americas to the Far
East, including stage productions, book culture, translations, film
and television adaptations, festivals, and national heritage. The
last section of the book focuses on the afterlife of Shakespeare in
the work of the leading British dramatist Tom Stoppard. Published
by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers
University Press.
The powerful exchanges between stage, stake, and scaffold - the
theatre, the bear garden and the spectacle of public execution -
crucially informed Shakespeare's explorations into the construction
and workings of 'the human'. The theatre's family resemblance to
animal baiting and the spectacle of punishment, its sharing of the
same basic type of performance space - a theatre-in-the-round, a
scaffold, stake or platform surrounded by spectators - bred an
ever-ready potential for a transfer of images and meanings. The
staging of one of these kinds of performance is always framed by an
awareness of the other two, whose presence is never quite erased
and often, indeed, emphatically foregrounded. Situating
Shakespearean drama within its material environment, Andreas Hofele
explores how this spill-over affects the way Shakespeare models his
human characters and his understanding of 'human character' in
general. His dramatis personae are infused with a degree of
animality that a later, more specifically Cartesian, anthropology
would categorically efface. Readings based on such an anthropology
tend to reduce Shakespeare's teeming multitude of animal references
to a stable marker of moral, social, and ontological difference,
'beast' being everything 'man' is not or ought not to be. In
contrast, Hofele argues that Shakespearean notions of humanity rely
just as much on inclusion as on exclusion of the animal. Humans and
animals face each other across the species divide, but the divide
proves highly permeable.
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