This Distracted Globe Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature [Hardcover]

Worldmaking takes many forms in early modern literature and thus challenges any single interpretive approach. The essays in this collection investigate the material stuff of the world in Spenser, Cary, and Marlowe; the sociable bonds of authorship, sexuality, and sovereignty in Shakespeare and others; and the universal status of spirit, gender, and empire in the worlds of Vaughan, Donne, and the dastan (tale) of Chouboli, a Rajasthani princess. Together, these essays make the case that to address what it takes to make a world in the early modern period requires the kinds of thinking exemplified by theory.This provocative and wide-ranging collection of essays is a tribute to Jonathan Goldberg... it is a fitting mirror and celebration of Goldberg's own influential body of scholarship.In essays ranging from theFaerie Queeneto contemporary performances of Urdu erotic tales, from Marlowes footstools to cognitive theory, the essays take up the productively vexed nature of distinctions of gender and sexuality, and the porousness of the divide between matter and spirit, friend and enemy, animate and inanimate.From Spensers toxic slime to Persian story theater, with way-stations that include Marlovian foot-stools, Horatian friendship, and Paracelsian ecology, this sparkling and timely collection of essays visits a dazzling range of world-making aspirations in Renaissance and early modern literature.These essays investigate the materiality of the world in Spenser, Cary and Marlowe; its sociability, sexuality and sovereignty in Shakespeare; and the universality of spirit, gender and empire in Vaughan, Donne and the dastan (tale) of Chouboli, a Rastanjani princess.