Julie Sanders

Susan Wiseman

Kate Chedgzoy

This collection of multi-authored essays not only refashions and revises critical understandings of the early modern dramatist Ben Jonson and his canon of work, but is also self-reflexive about the process. It includes original essays by both established and emergent Jonson scholars, and employs materialist, feminist and queer theory in the production of its readings of Jonsonian playtexts and masques, familiar and otherwise. It is intended to encourage new approaches by students to this central figure from the Renaissance.

Gender, Politics, and the Jonsonian Canon

Refashioning Ben Jonson

Taking Ovid's Metamorphoses as its starting point, this book analyses fantastic creatures including werewolves, bear-children and dragons in English literature from the Reformation to the late seventeenth century. Susan Wiseman tracks the idea of transformation through classical, literary, sacred, physiological, folkloric and ethnographic texts. Under modern disciplinary protocols these areas of writing are kept apart, but this study shows that in the Renaissance they were woven together by shared resources, frames of knowledge and readers. Drawing on a rich collection of critical and historical studies and key philosophical texts including Descartes' Meditations, Wiseman outlines the importance of metamorphosis as a significant literary mode. Her examples range from canonical literature, including Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, to Thomas Browne on dragons, together with popular material, arguing that the seventeenth century is marked by concentration on the potential of the human, and the world, to change or be changed.

1550–1700

Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance

Wiseman Susan

An analysis of the diverse focus of dramatic production in 1640s and 1650s England.

Drama and Politics in the English Civil War

Susan Wiseman analyses mythical and natural creatures in English Renaissance writing, including Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest.

Erica Fudge

Ruth Gilbert

What is, what was the human? This book argues that the making of the human as it is now understood implies a renegotiation of the relationship between the self and the world. The development of Renaissance technologies of difference such as mapping, colonialism and anatomy paradoxically also illuminated the similarities between human and non-human. This collection considers the borders between humans and their imagined others: animals, women, native subjects, machines. It examines border creatures (hermaphrodites, wildmen and cyborgs) and border practices (science, surveying and pornography).

Susan Wiseman

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