Research Catalog

Enclosure acts : sexuality, property, and culture in early modern England / edited by Richard Burt and John Michael Archer.

Title: Enclosure acts : sexuality, property, and culture in early modern England / edited by Richard Burt and John Michael Archer.
Publication: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1994.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	PR 418.S64 E53 1994	Off-site

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Additional Authors

Description

viii, 340 p.; 25 cm.

Summary

Enclosure - the conversion of peasants' commonly held lands to privately owned pasture - has long been considered a critical stage in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This book is the first, however, to treat in detail the literary and cultural implications of enclosure in early modern England. Bringing together the work of both senior and younger scholars who represent a wide range of critical orientations, Enclosure Acts focuses not only on the historical fact of land enclosure but also on the symbolic containment of sexuality in Elizabethan and Jacobean literary works. The first type of enclosure frequently has been treated by materialists and new historicists; feminists and theorists concerned with issues of gender have tended to concentrate on the second. The fourteen essays collected here explore the relationships between these two ways of perceiving enclosure in the context of cultural studies. Individual chapters examine the creation of territorial and social boundaries as well as the consequences of enclosure acts. Taking into account the complex implications of changes in boundaries - whether of land, religion, sexuality, or subjectivity - the essays investigate aspects of literary culture from the Elizabethan popular theater to the enclosed world of the seventeenth-century country-house poem. Among the topics discussed are the significance of enclosure in plays such as Marlowe's Edward II and Shakespeare's Richard II and Henry VI, and in the poetry of Marvell and Spenser.

Subject

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

committed to retain

Contents

Landlord not king : agrarian change and interarticulation / James R. Siemon -- "The nursery of beggary" : enclosure, vagrancy, and sedition in the Tudor-Stuart period / William C. Carroll -- Jack Cade in the garden : class consciousness and class conflict in 2 Henry VI / Thomas Cartelli -- Foreign country : the place of women and sexuality in Shakespeare's historical world / Phyllis Rackin -- Shakespeare and the English witch-hunts : enclosing the maternal body / Deborah Willis -- Observations on English bodies : licensing maternity in Shakespeare's late plays / Richard Wilson --
(cont.) The poetry of conduct : accommodation and transgression in The Faerie Queene, Book 6 / Michael C. Schoenfeldt -- Submitting to history : Marlowe's Edward II / Judith Haber -- The 1599 bishops' ban, Elizabethan pornography, and the sexualization of the Jacobean stage / Lynda E. Boose -- This is not a pipe : water supply, incontinent sources, and the leaky body politic / Jonathan Gil Harris -- The enclosure of virginity : the poetics of sexual abstinence in the English Revolution / John Rogers -- The garden enclosed / the woman enclosed : Marvell and the Cavalier poets / Cristina Malcolmson -- The garden state : Marvell's poetics of enclosure / Jonathan Crewe -- Dictionary English and the female tongue / Juliet Fleming.

ISBN

0801427452 (alk. paper)
0801480248 (pbk. : alk. paper)

LCCN

^^^93033886^

OCLC

29258748
SCSB-9904523

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library