Overview
- First book to consider how the discourse and concept of contagion in the period can provide a lens for understanding early modern theatrical performance, dramatic plots, and theatre-going
- In addition to engaging with the history of disease transmission, this collection considers how the language of contagion shapes dramatic narratives, contemporary understandings of theater-going, the history of emotion, and the perception of natural and preternatural phenomena
- Provides new readings of plays by Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, Webster, and Rowley
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (PLSM)
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Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Contagious Sensations
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Front Matter
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Spreading Abjection
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This collection of essays considers what constituted contagion in the minds of early moderns in the absence of modern germ theory. In a wide range of essays focused on early modern drama and the culture of theater, contributors explore how ideas of contagion not only inform representations of the senses (such as smell and touch) and emotions (such as disgust, pity, and shame) but also shape how people understood belief, narrative, and political agency. Epidemic thinking was not limited to medical inquiry or the narrow study of a particular disease. Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and other early modern writers understood that someone might be infected or transformed by the presence of others, through various kinds of exchange, or if exposed to certain ideas, practices, or environmental conditions. The discourse and concept of contagion provides a lens for understanding early modern theatrical performance, dramatic plots, and theater-going itself.
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Mary Floyd-Wilson is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage
Editors: Darryl Chalk, Mary Floyd-Wilson
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-14427-2Published: 28 June 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-14430-2Published: 14 August 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-14428-9Published: 17 June 2019
Series ISSN: 2634-6435
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6443
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 292
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Early Modern/Renaissance Literature, Literary History, Theatre History, British and Irish Literature