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This volume analyzes early modern cultural representations of children and childhood through the literature and drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Contributors include leading international scholars of the English Renaissance whose essays consider asexuals and sodomites, roaring girls and schoolboys, precocious princes and raucous tomboys, boy actors and female apprentices, while discussing a broad array of topics, from animal studies to performance theory, from queer time to queer fat, from teaching strategies to casting choices, and from metamorphic sex changes to rape and cannibalism. The collection interrogates the cultural and historical contingencies of childhood in an effort to expose, theorize, historicize, and explicate the spectacular queerness of early modern dramatic depictions of children.
List of contents
1 Introduction: Queer(ing) Children and Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture.-2 Asexuality, Queer Chastity, and Adolescence in Early Modern Literature .-3 "I Had Peopled Else": Shakespeare's Queer Natalities and the Reproduction of Race 57 Urvashi Chakravarty.-4 Queer Time and "Sideways Growth" in The Roaring Girl 79 Melissa Welshans.-5 Playing the Early Modern Tomboy 99 Jennifer Higginbotham.- 6 Queer Apprenticeship in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.-Mark Albert Johnston.-7 Moth and the Pedagogical Ideal in Love's Labor's Lost M. Tyler Sasser.-8 The Queerness of Precocious Play in John Webster's,-The White Devil Bethany Packard.-9 "A Prince so Young as I": Agequeerness and Marlowe's Boy King 195 Rachel Prusko.- 10 Queering Gender, Age, and Status in Early Modern Children's Drama Lucy Munro.-11 The Future-Killing Queer and the Future-Negating Child: Camping It Up and Destabilizing Boundaries in SamMendes's Richard III (1992) Gemma Miller Afterword Kate Chedgzoy.-Index
About the author
Jennifer Higginbotham is Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University, USA. Her book,
The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Sisters: Gender, Transgression, Adolescence, was published in 2013. Her scholarly articles on early modern girlhood, drama, and women's writing have appeared in the journals
Modern Philology,
Reformation,
Literature Compass, and
Sixteenth-Century Journal as well as the collections
The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays (2014) and
The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England (2017).
Mark Albert Johnston is Associate Professor of English at the University of Windsor, CA. His book,
Beard Fetish in Early Modern England: Sex, Gender, and Registers of Value was published in 2011 and again in 2016. His essays have appeared in
English Literary History,
Studies in English Literature,
English Literary Renaissance, and
Modern Philology, and in the collections
Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice: London 1550-1650 (Palgrave, 2010), and
Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage (2010).
Summary
- Brings together queer theory and childhood studies to illuminate our understanding of early modern drama and its various cultural contexts - Encourages new interactions with historical and political debates over the role and significance of children in queer history, and the place of queerness in children’s history- Insists on the centrality of queer theory to an understanding of early modern childhood
Additional text
“Kate Chedgzoy’s ‘Afterword’ which praises the collection and suggests that it be followed by research that treats the child as the subject. … A fruitful line of inquiry could be a feminist emphasis on finding minority voices, looking at identities across rather than along vectors of gender and sex.” (Rosalind Kerr, Renaissance and Reformation, Vol. 42 (1), 2019)
Report
"Kate Chedgzoy's 'Afterword' which praises the collection and suggests that it be followed by research that treats the child as the subject. ... A fruitful line of inquiry could be a feminist emphasis on finding minority voices, looking at identities across rather than along vectors of gender and sex." (Rosalind Kerr, Renaissance and Reformation, Vol. 42 (1), 2019)
