THE PERFORMANCE OF NOBILITY IN EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN LITERATURE by David M. Posner ( 9780521661812 )

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Title:

THE PERFORMANCE OF NOBILITY IN EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN LITERATURE

By:

Format:

Hardback

List price:	£90.00
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ISBN 10:

0521661811

ISBN 13:

9780521661812

Publisher:

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

4 November, 1999

Series:

Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature & Culture No. 33

Pages:

286

Description:

This book illuminates the idea of display and performance in Renaissance noble life and literature.

Synopsis:

This valuable study illuminates the idea of nobility as display, as public performance, in Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature and society. Ranging widely from Castiglione and French courtesy manuals, through Montaigne and Bacon, to the literature of the Grand Siecle, David Posner examines the structures of public identity in the period. He focuses on the developing tensions between, on the one hand, literary or imaginative representations of 'nobility' and, on the other, the increasingly problematic historical position of the nobility themselves. These tensions produce a transformation in the notion of the noble self as a performance, and eventually doom court society and its theatrical mode of self-presentation. Situated at the intersection of rhetorical and historical theories of interpretation, this book contributes significantly to our understanding of the role of literature both in analysing and in shaping social identity.

Publication:

Imprint:

Cambridge University Press

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Returnable

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THE PERFORMANCE OF NOBILITY IN EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN LITERATURE

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