What does queer death have to do with early modern England? This collection interrogates the profoundly queer, strange, excessive, camp and uncanny dimensions of death in early modern English literary, theatrical, and material archives.
Contributors provide new insights on death by using the analytic tools of queer theory, via non-binary analyses of gender, sexuality, humanity, nature, embodiment, and temporality. Turning queer analysis to questions of death allows it to be understood as non-dualist, non-linear, a-teleological, and fruitfully muddled. The essays illuminate early modern experiences before the ascendancy of Cartesian dualism occluded alternative understandings of death. They also speak to a present and a future where many received paradigms no longer hold. Key dramatic texts from the early modern period, including The Duchess of Malfi, The Alchemist, The Spanish Tragedy, The Winter's Tale, Richard III, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, show the expansive possibilities of death and dying in a queer mode. Further essays consider queer dimensions of death in lyric poetry, animal husbandry, typology, and Shakespearean authorship. These approaches make clear why readers interested in queerness and death should immerse themselves in the cultural life of sixteenth and seventeenth century England.
Muu info
This volume explores death as a queer subject in early modern England through literature and social history.
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
1. Introduction: What's queer about early modern death?
Christine Varnado (State University of New York-Buffalo, USA) and Lauren
Shohet (Villanova University, USA)
2. (Un-)/Dead again: dying and undying in The Duchess of Malfi
Penelope Meyers Usher (Barnard College, USA)
3. John Donne and the queer wit of early modern death
Miriam Jacobson (University of Georgia, USA)
4. How to laugh at death and why (or, Pyramus and Thisbe as suicidal
camp)
Drew Daniel (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
5. Queer uses of disease, death, and other crises: a jugaad reading of
The Alchemist
Tripthi Pillai (Coastal Carolina University, USA)
6. Some part of his funerals: playing the part of the departed in
Nicholas Udalls Roister Doister
Joseph Kidney (Stanford University, USA)
7. Surviving Richard III
James Y. Mulder (Bentley University, USA)
8. Baited bulls and crammed capons: queer animal death in early modern
England
Karen Raber (University of Mississippi, USA)
9. The Queerness of typology
Lauren Shohet (Villanova University, USA)
10. Queering the death of the author: temporal multiplicity and
Shakespeares literary authorship
Wolfram Keller (Free University of Berlin, Germany)
Afterword: And is this the end? Oh, no, there is no end
Alice Dailey (Villanova University, USA)
Index
Lauren Shohet is Professor of English, Villanova University, USA.
Christine Varnado is Associate Professor of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, USA.
