Title: Introduction: Metaphor and Social Subjectivity
Abstract: Much has been written about the Renaissance project to fashion the self, even, according to Harold Bloom's famous formulation, about the Renaissance and more specifically Shakespeare's 'invention' of human subjectivity. This attention to the rhetoric of 'selfhood' reflects an interest in individual agency that is a marker of modern literary (and political) taste. A parallel strand of historicist criticism, which looks at the emergence and mediation of literary nationalism, is usually not so much celebratory as implicitly cautionary. However, selfhood does not exist in isolation, and if it does, it should be seen as abnormally sociopathic; if we interest ourselves in the way in which Renaissance literature invoked and explored the complexities of human psychology, we should also give close analytic consideration to the literary processes involved in fashioning a self-reflexive awareness of collective identity. Shakespeare certainly did; as purveyor of dramatic commodities to a theatre-going public, he could not afford not to.
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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