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The Shattering of the Self

Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts

Cynthia Marshall

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In The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts, Cynthia Marshall reconceptualizes the place and function of violence in Renaissance literature. During the Renaissance an emerging concept of the autonomous self within art, politics, religion, commerce, and other areas existed in tandem with an established, popular sense of the self as fluid, unstable, and volatile. Marshall examines an early modern fascination with erotically charged violence to show how texts of various kinds allowed temporary release from an individualism that was constraining. Scenes such as...

In The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts, Cynthia Marshall reconceptualizes the place and function of violence in Renaissance literature. During the Renaissance an emerging concept of the autonomous self within art, politics, religion, commerce, and other areas existed in tandem with an established, popular sense of the self as fluid, unstable, and volatile. Marshall examines an early modern fascination with erotically charged violence to show how texts of various kinds allowed temporary release from an individualism that was constraining. Scenes such as Gloucester's blinding and Cordelia's death in King Lear or the dismemberment and sexual violence depicted in Titus Andronicus allowed audience members not only a release but a "shattering"—as opposed to an affirmation—of the self.

Marshall draws upon close readings of Shakespearean plays, Petrarchan sonnets, John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of the Christian Martyrs, and John Ford's The Broken Heart to successfully address questions of subjectivity, psychoanalytic theory, and identity via a cultural response to art. Timely in its offering of an account that is both historically and psychoanalytically informed, The Shattering of the Self argues for a renewed attention to the place of fantasy in this literature and will be of interest to scholars working in Renaissance and early modern studies, literary theory, gender studies, and film theory.

Reviews

Reviews

Marshall effectively brings to our attention the variety of ways in which late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century texts successfully exploited means to debunk the emergent concept of selfhood... An original and stimulating contribution to the field of Renaissance studies, offering insights that go far beyond the boundaries of a specific discipline.

In this interesting study of violence in early modern English drama, Marshall sets out to demonstrate how these texts offer their audiences an experience of psychic fracture that results from conflicting yet coexistent perceptions of subjectivity.

Marshall leaves her own readers with a rich sense of what it may have meant, and may still mean, to lose oneself in the violent pleasures of Renaissance textuality.

Elegant book... the book's reach goes beyond studies of the early modern period.

Brilliantly employing the insights of Freudian, Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis in a series of close textual readings, Marshall demonstrates the early modern self's desire for self-dissolution in the rough textual pleasures of jouissance and connects that desire with contemporary interest in the ethics of pornography and other violent forms of spectatorship. This is a study of major importance to which I will turn again and again.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
232
ISBN
9780801876431
Illustration Description
5 b&w illus., 5 line drawings
Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Violence, Subjectivity, and Paradoxes of Pleasure
Chapter 2. "To Speak of Love" in the Language of Petrarchanism
Chapter 3. Foxe and the

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Violence, Subjectivity, and Paradoxes of Pleasure
Chapter 2. "To Speak of Love" in the Language of Petrarchanism
Chapter 3. Foxe and the Touissance of Martyrology
Chapter 4. The Pornographic Economy of Titus Andronicus
Chapter 5. Form, Characters, Viewers, and Ford's The Broken Heart
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author Bio
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Cynthia Marshall

Cynthia Marshall is a professor of English at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.