Forgetting In Early Modern English Literature And Culture: Lethe's Legacy (routledge Studies In Renaissance Literature And Culture, 3)

111 Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture 011 111 0111 0111 0111 111 This collection of essays historicizes and theorizes forgetting in English Renaissance literary texts and their cultural contexts. Its essays open up a field of study overlooked by contemporary Renaissance scholarship, which is too often swayed by a critical paradigm devoted to the “art of memory.” Such a field recovers forgetting’s crucial role in the production of early modernity’s subjective and collective identities, desires, and fantasies. Because forgetting is, as the introduction argues, a cultural presence not an absence, each of the volume’s four sections concentrates on a distinctive site of forgetting. The first section investigates the body as a volatile site of forgetting; the second examines poetic and rhetorical signs of forgetting; the third explores narratives of identity formation, reformation, and deformation; and the final section considers forgetting’s localities, ranging from the imaginary geography of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the early modern theatre and library. This book promotes a dynamic view of forgetting neither confined to a single discourse nor dominated by a single concept. Together its essays show how forgetting not only struggles and colludes with remembering to produce culture, but also forms its own images, places, materialities, and practices. Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture is essential reading for students and scholars of Renaissance Studies. Christopher Ivic is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY, Potsdam. His articles on cultural identities in early modern Britain and Ireland have appeared in such books as Archipelagic Identities and British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, as well as in Ariel, Genre, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Grant Williams is Assistant Professor of English at Nipissing University. His articles on corporeal fantasies in early modern rhetoric, medical discourse, and literature have appeared in Spenser Studies, Exemplaria, ELH, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Routledge studies in Renaissance literature and culture 1 Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre P. A. Skantze 2 The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson Mary Ellen Lamb 3 Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture Lethe’s legacies Edited by Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams 4 Irigaray and Premodern Culture Edited by Theresa Krier and Elizabeth D. Harvey 111 Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture Lethe’s legacies 011 111 0111 0111 0111 111 Edited by Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams First published 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2004 Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams for editorial matter and selection; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,