Re-imagining Western European geography in English Renaissance drama / Monica Matei-Chesnoiu.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Matei-Chesnoiu, Monica, 1954-

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Series:

Early modern literature in history (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm))

Early modern literature in history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English drama--Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600--History and criticism.

English drama.

English drama--17th century--History and criticism.

Geography in literature.

Renaissance--England.

Renaissance.

England.

Europe, Western--In literature.

Europe, Western.

Western Europe.

Physical Description:

ix, 220 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Summary:

Focusing on how citizens of early modern England tried to locate themselves and their nation through geography and travel writing, Monica Matie-Chesniou explores theatrical presentations of Western European space and ethnography. Geographic discourses share many features with drama in that they appeal to the reader's and audience's curiosity and imagination. Playwrights use information derived from geography treatises as vehicles to allegorize contemporary English issues in a dialogical mode. While geography and travel texts provide an objective synthesis in describing Western European nations, dramatic interaction destabilizes any preconceived notions and submits contrastive views on imagined global European communities. This book explores representations of France, Spain, Germany, the Low Countries, and Denmark in a wide range of geography texts and offers fresh readings of Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton, Dekker, Massinger, Marston, and others. Book jacket.

Contents:

Geography as the eye of history

Constructing fictions of geographical knowledge

Reconsidering classical geography

Seeing, imagining, and representing the world in English

Continental geography and travel in english translations

Romanticized France in the English imagination

Stabilizing French images in english geography

Familiar and foreign France in English drama

Shifting views of the German principalities

German land in the english geographic imagination

Reading German ethnicity in English comedies

Geography and trade: the low countries and Denmark

Mapping cultural memory via geography

From geography to commercial traffic in drama

Spain from court to country

Spain in early modern English geography

Reconstructing Spain in English drama.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-212) and index.

ISBN:

9780230366305

0230366309

OCLC:

794973775