Popular Culture and the Material in Early Modern England
This session seeks to explore the relationship between material culture and
early modern popular literature. Of particular interest is work that
examines how the study of material objects (cloth, books, food, etc.)
informs our understanding of popular discourses including-but not limited
to-drama, broadside ballads, pamphlets, and public performances.
The material culture of early modern England has received increasing
scholarly attention in recent years. The study of the subject has been
complicated in fascinating ways by the study of the object. In a recent
collection of essays, Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, the
editors, Margreta de Graza, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, ask
the crucial question, "what new configurations will emerge when subject and
object are kept in relation?" By investigating the historical role of
tangible things (clothes, food, architecture, books, etc.), we have become
better able to understand their influence in the everyday lives the early
modern person. Simultaneously, there has been increasing academic interest
in early modern texts that have been on the margins of the canon but were
nonetheless popular in their own time. The study of drama for the public
theaters, scripts for civic processions, broadside ballads, sermons, and
pamphlets--accessible, popular texts--has enriched our understanding of the
cultural production of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.
This panel seeks to investigate the ways in which early modern material
culture intersects with these popular texts. What new knowledge can we gain
when we take seriously both everyday objects and popular literature?
Send 500 word abstract and c.v. by September 15th to:
Roze Hentschell
Department of English
William Paterson University
300 Pompton Rd.
Wayne, NJ 07470
Or via e-mail to:
hentschellr@wpunj.edu
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