Refiguring Mimesis

About the book

“A collection of 11 critical essays of serious import ... It surprises and delights with fresh readings of Shakespeare ... a book not to be missed” Chronique, Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance

“Diverse and provocative” Robert Wilcher, Modern Language Review

The early modern period is characterised by a crisis of representational practice. Fuelled by both the iconoclastic impulses of reformed religion and profound political and economic changes, the literature of the period negotiates an acute cultural engagement with the discourses of representation.

Early modern scholarship has sought to define the early modern subject in relation to a careful historicism as well as to a materialist analysis of cultural production.

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At the same time, continental thought has responded to our own late-capitalist crisis in representation, under the umbrella terms poststructuralism and postmodernism.
This response has been characterised by a move away from theories of artistic or authorial expressivity and a renewed interest (logical in retrospect) in the much older concept of mimesis. Whether it is in the writing of Theodore Adorno, Jean Baudrillard, or Jacques Derrida himself, mimesis is firmly back on the philosophical agenda.
However, in the Anglo-American critical tradition the assumption that mimesis stands for an epistemologically transparent 'reflection of reality' remains almost unconsciously ingrained in much critical discourse: the shadow cast by Erich Auerbach's seminal study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (first published fifty years ago) is a long one.
This volume aims to refigure the Auerbachian hegemony by re-focussing on the irreducibility of the mimetic as a philosophical idea.

View the table of contents

	Contributors	vii
	Foreword: Hamlet and Auerbach Peter Holland	xi
	Introduction Jonathan Holmes and Adrian Streete	1
1	“Scenes from the life of one who is suited for nothing”: Shakespeare and the question of mimesis Roger Starling	15
2	“'Tis in reversion that I do possess”: speculation and destination in Richard II Vance Adair	37
3	Platonism and bathos in Shakespeare and other early modern drama Gabriel Egan	59
4	“Pluck but his name out of his heart”: a Caesarean cross-section Paul Innes	79
5	“Bananas on a mango tree”: colonial mimesis, hybridity and modern Indian theatre Poonam Trivedi	99
6	Court masque and the (re)production of aristocratic identity Monika Smialkowska	117
7	The distorting mirror: theatrical mimesis on the early modern transvestite stage Christian Billing	137
8	Mimesis, resistance and iconoclasm: resituating The Revenger's Tragedy Adrian Streete	160
9	“There must be something heard”: John Donne's aural universe Jonathan Holmes	183
	Afterword John Drakakis	208
	Index	217

About the Author/s:

Jonathan Holmes

Jonathan Holmes is a UK theatre director and writer. He taught drama at Royal Holloway, University of London for six years, leaving in 2007.
Other titles by this author
Fallujah, Holmes J, Constable, 2007
Refiguring Mimesis: Representation in early modern literature, Holmes J and Streete A, University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005
Merely Players?: Actors' accounts of performing Shakespeare, Holmes J, Routledge, 2004

Adrian Streete

Dr Adrian Streete is Senior Lecturer in English Literature, 1500-1780, at the University of Glasgow. He works on the relationships between early modern literature and the religious, political, and philosophical thought of the period.
Other books include
Refiguring Mimesis (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005)
Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2009; paperback edition, 2011)
Early Modern Drama and the Bible: Contexts and Readings, 1570-1625 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
Filming and Performing Renaissance History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2011)

ISBN: 978-1-902806-35-8 Format: Paperback, 240pp Published: Feb 2005

Refiguring Mimesis

Representation in early modern literature

About the book

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Jonathan Holmes

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Adrian Streete

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