1st Edition

Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Edited By Ingo Berensmeyer, Andrew Hadfield Copyright 2016
120 Pages
by Routledge

120 Pages
by Routledge

116 Pages
by Routledge

Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture examines the historical, cultural, and epistemological underpinnings of lying and deception in early modern England, including the political, religious, aesthetic, and philosophical discourses that governed the codes of lying and truth-telling from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. The contributions to this collection draw on a... Read more

Introduction: Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture Ingo Berensmeyer and Andrew Hadfield

1. Hiding the Peacock’s Legs: Rhetoric, Cosmetics and Deception in Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Trussell’s Hellen Anna Swärdh

2. Mendacity and Kingship in Shakespeare’s Henry V and Richard III Eric Pudney

3. ‘An Anxious Entangling and Perplexing of Consciences’: John Donne and Catholic Recusant Mendacity Shanyn Altman

4. Truth and Lying in Early Modern Travel Narratives: Coryat’s Crudities, Lithgow’s Totall Discourse and Generic Change Kirsten Sandrock

5. ‘Betrayed My Credulous Innocence’: Mendacity and Female Education in John Milton and the ‘Battle of the Sexes’ Anne-Julia Zwierlein

6. Lying, Language and Intention: Reflections on Swift Brean Hammond and Gregory Currie

Biography

Ingo Berensmeyer is Professor of English and American Literature at Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany, and Visiting Professor of English Literature and Culture at Ghent University, Belgium. His research interests range from Shakespeare to contemporary literature. His most recent publications are 'Angles of Contingency': Literarische Kultur im England des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (2007); study guides to Shakespeare's Hamlet (2007) and to Literary Theory (2009) and the co-edited book Perspectives on Mobility (with Christoph Ehland, 2013).

Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, and Visiting Professor at the University of Granada, Spain. He is the author of a number of works on early modern literature, including Edmund Spenser: A Life (2012), Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005), and Literature, Travel and Colonialism in the English Renaissance, 1540-1625 (1998). He is vice-chair of the Society for Renaissance Studies and is currently writing a book on lying in early modern England.