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This book explores the textual and semiotic construction of early modern English identities. To this end, the contributors - scholars from various European universities - address a diversity of literary and non-literary, visual and written, texts from the 16th and 17th centuries, such as plays, pamphlets, travel narratives, dictionaries and emblematic literature, in order to determine how the textual and semiotic (re)production of strangers (be they Muslim, Black or Catholic) in these texts actively participates in the early modern shaping of English identities. In order to explore these processes the authors apply a diversity of critical tools, such as cultural materialist and cultural semiotic (Lotmanian) methodologies, among others.
List of contents
Contents: Andrew Monnickendam: Introduction - Luciano García: The Moor in the English Dramatic Mirror: The Term 'Moor' in the Primary Texts of Early Modern English Plays - Jesús Nieto/Cinta Zunino: «As we are Englishmen, so are we Men»: Patterns of Otherness in George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar - John Drakakis: Strangers in Marlowe and Shakespeare - Jesús López-Peláez: The Other Within: Muslims and Moriscos in Shakespeare's Othello and Calderón's Tuzaní - Rüdiger Ahrens: Alterity in William Shakespeare's Plays The Merchant of Venice and Othello - José Ruiz: The Image of the Great Turk after the Ottoman Conquest of Famagusta and Marc Antonio Bragadino's Martyrdom: From its Genesis in the Anti-Turkish Propaganda of Venetian Narratives and Chronicles to its Impact in English Literature - Eroulla Demetriou: Genes and Jabs: Spanish Genealogy as Portrayed by English Protestant Pamphleteers during the Spanish Match Negotiations (1617-1624) - María Paz López-Peláez: «Virtutem aut vitium sequi genus.» Blackness and Moorishness in English Iconography - Yolanda Caballero: Patterns of Female Exploration in Delarivier Manley's Oriental Plays.
About the author
Jesús López-Peláez is Associate Professor at the University of Jaén (Spain), where he currently teaches English medieval and early modern literature, and British drama. His latest book was
Honourable Murderers (Peter Lang, 2009), a comparative analysis of the concept of honour in Shakespeare and Calderón de la Barca. The editor has published on early modern English and Comparative literature in several European and American academic journals, and is the Research Project Manager in the project
Muslims, Spaniards and Jews in Early Modern English texts: The Construction of the Other, funded by the Spanish Government.
