Disgust in early modern English literature / edited by Natalie K. Eschenbaum and Barbara Correll.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Eschenbaum, Natalie K., editor.

Correll, Barbara, editor.

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English literature.

Aversion in literature.

Literature and society--England--History--16th century.

Literature and society.

England.

History.

Literature and society--England--History--17th century.

English literature--Early modern.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Physical Description:

xi; 218 pages ; 24cm

Place of Publication:

Farnham, Surrey, UK ; Burlington, VT : Ashgate, [2016]

Summary:

What is the role of disgust or revulsion in early modern English literature? How did early modern English subjects experience revulsion and how did writers represent it in poetry, plays, and prose? What does it mean when literature instructs, delights, and disgusts? This collection of essays looks at the treatment of disgust in texts by Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herrick, and others to demonstrate how disgust, perhaps more than other affects, gives us a more complex understanding of early modern culture. Dealing with descriptions of coagulated eye drainage, stinky leeks, and blood-filled fleas, among other sensational things, the essays focus on three kinds of disgusting encounters: sexual, cultural, and textual. Early modern English writers used disgust to explore sexual mores, describe encounters with foreign cultures, and manipulate their readers' responses. The essays in this collection show how writers deployed disgust to draw, and sometimes to upset, the boundaries that had previously defined acceptable and unacceptable behaviors, people, and literatures. Together they present the compelling argument that a critical understanding of early modern cultural perspectives requires careful attention to disgust. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction / Natalie K. Eschenbaum and Barbara Correll

Part 1. Sexual encounters

Dirty jokes: disgust, desire, and the pornographic narrative in Thomas Nashe's The unfortunate traveller / Emily King

Guyon's Blush: shame, disgust, and desire in The Faerie Queene, book 2 / Barbara Correll

Desiring disgust in Robert Herrick's Epigrams / Natalie K. Eschenbaum

Discerning (Dis)taste: delineating sexual mores in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis / Marcela Kostihová

Part 2. Cultural encounters

Indecorous customs, rhetorical decorum, and the reception of Herodotean ethnography from Henri Estienne to Edmund Spenser / Galena Hashhozheva

Food, filth, and the foreign: disgust in the seventeenth-century travelogue / Gitanjali Shahani

"Qualmish at the smell of leek": overcoming disgust and creating the nation-state in Henry V / Colleen E. Kennedy

Part 3. Textual encounters

"The fairing of good counsel": allegory, disgust, and discretion in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair / Ineke Murakami

Jonson's old age: the force of disgust / Laura Kolb

"Rankly digested, doth those things out-spue": John Donne, bodily fluids, and the metaphysical abject / Dan Mills

End matter

Afterword / Georgia E. Brown.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9781472440044

1472440048

OCLC:

934100048