English ethnicity and race in early modern drama
By: Mary Floyd-Wilson.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Cambridge, U.K; New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 256
Subjects: English drama -- Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 -- History and criticism.; Ethnicity in literature.; English drama -- 17th century -- History and criticism.; Ethnic relations in literature.; Race relations in literature.; Ethnic groups in literature.; Race in literature.
Description: "The importance of English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama lies in its recognition that the English were afflicted in the sixteenth century by a profoundly unstable sense of identity derived from the British Isle's northern, marginalized status in a set of classical texts that were revered and considered authoritative. Simply put, humoralism, for the early modern English, was ethnology. Floyd-Wilson demonstrates that the English not only were driven to rearrange, discursively, this inherited knowledge in an effort to revalue those traits conventionally identified as 'northern', but they also aimed to alter or remedy their northern natures through the manipulation of their environment, whether that meant the air, temperature, diet and terrain, or the effects of travel, education, rhetoric, impersonation or fashion. To follow Floyd-Wilson's application of contemporary geohumoral theory to a succession of major canonical texts is exhilarating, surprising and unsettling, as Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson and others emerge as unwittingly complicit in ways of thinking about English selfhood that enabled the growth of the Atlantic slave trade and British imperialism."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.