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Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare / Jonathan Gil Harris.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2010]Copyright date: ©2009Description: 1 online resource (288 p.) : 8 illusContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780812241181
  • 9780812202205
Subject(s): Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Introduction. Palimpsested Time -- PART I. Supersessions -- Introduction -- One. Reading Matter -- Two. Performing History -- PART II. Explosions -- Introduction -- Three. The Writing On The Wall -- Four. The Smell Of Gunpowder -- PART III. Conjunctions -- Introduction -- Five. Touching Matters -- Six. Crumpled Handkerchiefs -- Coda. Dis-Orientations -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- Acknowledgments
Summary: Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleThe New Historicism of the 1980s and early 1990s was preoccupied with the fashioning of early modern subjects. But, Jonathan Gil Harris notes, the pronounced tendency now is to engage with objects. From textiles to stage beards to furniture, objects are read by literary critics as closely as literature used to be. For a growing number of Renaissance and Shakespeare scholars, the play is no longer the thing: the thing is the thing. Curiously, the current wave of "thing studies" has largely avoided posing questions of time. How do we understand time through a thing? What is the time of a thing?In Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Harris challenges the ways we conventionally understand physical objects and their relation to history. Turning to Renaissance theories of matter, Harris considers the profound untimeliness of things, focusing particularly on Shakespeare's stage materials. He reveals that many "Renaissance" objects were actually survivals from an older time-the medieval monastic properties that, post-Reformation, were recycled as stage props in the public playhouses, or the old Roman walls of London, still visible in Shakespeare's time. Then, as now, old objects were inherited, recycled, repurposed; they were polytemporal or palimpsested.By treating matter as dynamic and temporally hybrid, Harris addresses objects in their futurity, not just in their encapsulation of the past. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare is a bold study that puts the matériel-the explosive, world-changing potential-back into a "material culture" that has been too often understood as inert stuff.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Introduction. Palimpsested Time -- PART I. Supersessions -- Introduction -- One. Reading Matter -- Two. Performing History -- PART II. Explosions -- Introduction -- Three. The Writing On The Wall -- Four. The Smell Of Gunpowder -- PART III. Conjunctions -- Introduction -- Five. Touching Matters -- Six. Crumpled Handkerchiefs -- Coda. Dis-Orientations -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- Acknowledgments

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http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleThe New Historicism of the 1980s and early 1990s was preoccupied with the fashioning of early modern subjects. But, Jonathan Gil Harris notes, the pronounced tendency now is to engage with objects. From textiles to stage beards to furniture, objects are read by literary critics as closely as literature used to be. For a growing number of Renaissance and Shakespeare scholars, the play is no longer the thing: the thing is the thing. Curiously, the current wave of "thing studies" has largely avoided posing questions of time. How do we understand time through a thing? What is the time of a thing?In Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Harris challenges the ways we conventionally understand physical objects and their relation to history. Turning to Renaissance theories of matter, Harris considers the profound untimeliness of things, focusing particularly on Shakespeare's stage materials. He reveals that many "Renaissance" objects were actually survivals from an older time-the medieval monastic properties that, post-Reformation, were recycled as stage props in the public playhouses, or the old Roman walls of London, still visible in Shakespeare's time. Then, as now, old objects were inherited, recycled, repurposed; they were polytemporal or palimpsested.By treating matter as dynamic and temporally hybrid, Harris addresses objects in their futurity, not just in their encapsulation of the past. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare is a bold study that puts the matériel-the explosive, world-changing potential-back into a "material culture" that has been too often understood as inert stuff.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2022)