The Expense of Spirit
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Mary Beth Rose
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Funded by:
National Endowment for the Humanities Op en Book Program
About this book
A public and highly popular literary form, English Renaissance drama affords a uniquely valuable index of the process of cultural transformation. The Expense of Spirit integrates feminist and historicist critical approaches to explore the dynamics of cultural conflict and change during a crucial period in the formation of modern sexual values. Comparing Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic representations of love and sexuality with those in contemporary moral tracts and religious writings on women, love, and marriage, Mary Beth Rose argues that such literature not only interpreted sexual sensibilities but also contributed to creating and transforming them.
Author / Editor information
Mary Beth Rose is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature and editor of Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives.
Reviews
What is especially interesting here is the sophistication with which Rose develops her argument in relation to dramatic genres. She is acute in registering the ways that the ideological inconsistencies evident in nondramatic texts become the stuff of dramatic conflict, and occasionally resolution, on stage. Trenchantly and persuasively, Rose argues that the shift of focus in tragedy from the Elizabethan concern with public action to the Jacobean preoccupation with domestic life and individual psychology witnesses the new dignity and significance assigned to private life.
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Preface
ix -
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Introduction
1 -
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1. Moral Conceptions of Sexual Love in Elizabethan Comedy
12 -
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2. Sexual Disguise and Social Mobility in Jacobean City Comedy
43 -
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3. A Waste of Shame: The Heroics of Marriage in English Renaissance Tragedy
93 -
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4. Transforming Sexuality : Jacobean Tragicomedy and the Reconfiguration of Private Life
178 -
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Index
237
