Early
modern English dialogues: Spoken interaction as writing.
The book draws heavily upon important and well-known historicist studies of early
modern English literature, such as Helgerson's Forms of Nationhood (2001), Howard and Rackin's Engendering a Nation (1997), Holderness's Shakespeare's History Plays (1992), and Rackin's Stages of History (1990).
The topics include Marian verse as politically oppositional poetry in Elizabethan England, performance and Parshanut: The Historie of Jacob and Esau, biblical and rabbinic intertextuality in George Herbert's "The Collar" and "The Pearl," some literary and historiographical challenges in reading funeral sermons for early
modern English women, and the language of tragic community in King Lear.
In the opening chapter, 'Late
Modern English in its Historical Context', Beal provides a lengthy introduction to the historical events of the time before concentrating on the linguistic features that distinguish this period from its predecessor.
For instance, advertise, advise, franchise, supervise, surprise, televise are just six of the many words that can be spelt only with -ise, which was stressed in my 1950 copy of Fowler's
Modern English Usage (about which more follows) - which was much earlier than the 1990s claimed by Mr Scalese to be when it was first used.
Chair of judges Peter Stothard described Mantel as the "greatest
modern English prose writer", and said that she had rewritten the art of historical fiction.
This collection of prose and verse, translated into
modern English, is designed 'to help students of English Literature deal with the transition from "Old English" to "Middle English'", i.
Believing that previous collections of Old English verse put into
modern English by single translators seldom noteworthy as original poets have suffered from lack of both poetry and a variety of poetic voices, the editors commissioned versions from writers known best as poets themselves, though plenty of these (Seamus Heaney, Richard Wilbur, James Harpur, and many Irish men and women who have done yeomanly service to Gaelic poetry) are famous as translators, too.
The stay and event were organised by the
Modern English School in Egypt which invited more than 10 different countries from across the Middle East including Dubai, UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and chose Dusit Thani LakeView Cairo Hotel to be the home of this group and event.
Over the last decade or so, a number of influential histories of early modern cartography have forged compelling links between early
modern English space and place, such as, to name just two, Andrew McRae's 1996 The Map of Agrarian England, 1500-1660, and Lesley Cormack's 1997 Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580-1620.
His work is a must read for anyone evaluating and criticizing
modern English literature in comparison to the literature of the empire.
While I do not consider the book a groundbreaking study of race in Renaissance and early
modern English literature, I do find the study to be insightful, nuanced and a persuasive contribution to ongoing debates about race.
