Reading the road, from Shakespeare's crossways to Bunyan's highways / edited by Lisa Hopkins and Bill Angus.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hopkins, Lisa, Author.

Contributor:

Hopkins, Lisa, 1962- editor.

Angus, Bill, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Roads in literature.

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

English literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (274 pages)

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2020]

Summary:

Explores how cultural conceptions of mobility and the road contribute to identity and culture in early modern BritainOpens new windows on early modern culture, subjectivity and perceptions around the experience of the road and how that shapes the idea of the road itselfOffers insight into the ways both the bare boards of the stage and prose narratives were used to imagine road journeys and the intersections between public and private spaceEnhances historical understanding of the literal place of theatre in the road networks around early modern LondonProvides a crucial ligature in English literary and cultural history. The present plays and prose are prolegomena to the travel literature of Montagu, Swift, Boswell and Johnson in the Hebrides, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Fielding’s Tom Jones, and peripatetic Civil War narrativesThis book brings together thirteen essays, by both established and emerging scholars, which examine the most influential meanings of roads in early modern literature and culture. Chapters develop our understanding of the place of the road in the early modern imagination and open various windows on a geography which may by its nature seem passing or trivial but is in fact central to all conceptions of movement. They also shed new light on perhaps the most astonishing achievement of early modern plays: their use of one small, bare space to suggest an amazing variety of physical and potentially metaphysical locations.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Allegories, Economies and Resonances of the Road

I. Shakespeare’s Roads

1 The Low Road and the High Road: Macbeth and the Way to Scotland

2 Uncolting Falstaff: The Oats Complex and Energy Crisis in 1 Henry IV

3 The Night, the Crossroads and the Stake: Shakespeare and the Outcast Dead

4 Gender, Vagrancy and the Culture of the Early Modern Road in As You Like It

5 Traversing Monstrosity: Perilous Women and Powerful Men upon Shakespeare’s Roads

II. The Embodied Road

6 Not So Tedious Ways to Think about the Locations of the Early Playhouses

7 Wandering Fools and Foolish Vagrants: Folly on the Road in Early Modern English Culture

8 ‘Fallen Am I in Dark Uneven Way’: Wandering from the Road in Early Modern Folklore and Drama

9 ‘I Must Abroad or Perish!’: The Meta-theatre of the Road in Brome’s A Jovial Crew

III. Writing the Road

10 Staging the Road: Walking, Talking, Footing

11 The Road to Damascus and the Road to Hell in Philip Massinger’s The Renegado: Islamic England and the Pauline Crossroads

12 How Margaret Cavendish Mapped a Blazing World

13 ‘The King’s Highway’: Reading England’s Road in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part I

Conclusion

Notes on Contributors

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-4744-8124-8

1-4744-5413-5

OCLC:

1312726910