Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture

by Margreta de Grazia (Editor), Maureen Quilligan (Editor), Peter Stallybrass (Editor)

This collection of essays brings together leading scholars of the early modern period, and offers a new focus on the literature and culture of the Renaissance. Traditionally, Renaissance studies has concentrated on the human subject; the essays collected here bring objects--purses, clothes, tapestries, houses, maps, feathers, tools, skulls--back into view. Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture puts things back into relation with people, eliciting not only new critical readings of key texts, but also new configurations of Renaissance culture.

420 pages, Hardcover

First published February 23, 1996

About the author

Margreta de Grazia received her PhD in English from Princeton with a specialization in Renaissance literature. Her first book Shakespeare Verbatim (Oxford, 1991) traces the emergence of Shakespeare as a modern author from late eighteenth-century editorial imperatives. Her second book, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge, 2007), awarded both the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize and the Elizabeth Dietz Award, demonstrates how the modern tradition of psychologizing Hamlet has effaced both the play's and the protagonist's preoccupation with land and entitlement.

She has also co-edited Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge, 1996) with Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass and both the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2001) and the New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2010) with Stanley Wells. Her interests at present include Shakespeare as an historical and cultural phenomenon, early modern notions of subjectivity and authorship, the production and ownership of early modern texts, and the chronologizing, periodizing, and secularizing of Shakespeare.

She has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation and is presently the Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Professor of the Humanities. In 2005 she received the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching and in 2010, the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring.

(from https://www.english.upenn.edu/People/...)

Reviews

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

An almost perfect book of literary and cultural criticism, "Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture" is the type of book of which it becomes like glue, stuck in your grasp until the final page has been perused (far too soon). For, from its initial article on "superfluous things" in Shakespeare's "King Lear," to its ultimate article entitled "Desire is Death," this book, with erudition and grace, outlines specific topics that fall under its rubric of subject and object in Renaissance times. Thus one is led through "Textile and Textual properties in Ovid, Sandys, and Spenser," which gives one grand insight into the role textiles play in various media, including Velasquez's "Las Hilanderas,"; this provides the reader with clear insight into the topic at hand as well as giving acquaintanceship to great works of art in light of the gaze of top-ranked scholarship. Moreover, in Part III of the tome, entitled, "Appropriations," the reader receives a clear and acute analysis of the role early modern slavery, which provided the wealth which fueled the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, and its relation to the nascent forms of economy in England to John Milton's epoch-making poem, "Paradise Lost." This particular article blends the social, the economical, the political, and the literary in a manner which enlightens and entertains the reader who is provided a view of all the aforementioned topics. The book also provides a delightfully instructive glance, in "Unlearning the Aztec Cantares (preliminaries to a postcolonial history)," of the role translation played in altering the nature of a indigenous piece of song in early modern Mexico and how this process, the process of unconsciously altering the other through our unintended application of Western technologies and thought, can provide a model of how true postcolonial history may approach its subject matter. In fact, throughout all the articles, a tone of high minded and articulate, critical discourse, designed to discover, and, if possible, to subvert, is maintained, adding acute, probing intelligence to the attributes of the wide ranging study of the volume. So, all in all, the books attempts much and accomplishes the lion share of its endeavours. Additionally, it surveys its subject matter with much philosophical and literary wisdom, providing a deep understanding of the early modern period, a period which, it is shown, provides much of our world its nature and issues. With a tone of informed, erudite analysis and probing intelligence, "Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture" is a book that is highly recommended.