The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare May 2000.pdf

This page intentionally left blankThis book analyzes plex, often violent connections betweenbody and voice in narrative, lyric and dramatic works by Ovid,Petrarch, Marston and Shakespeare. Lynn Enterline describes thefoundational yet often disruptive force that Ovidian rhetoric exerts onearly modern poetry, particularly on representations of the self, thebody, and erotic life. Paying close attention to the trope of the femalevoice in theMetamorphoses, as well as early modern attempts toventriloquize women's voices that are indebted to Ovid's work, sheargues that Ovid's rhetoric of the body profoundly challenges Renais-sance representations of authorship as well as conceptions about thedifference between male and female experience. This vividly originalbook makes a vital contribution to the study of Ovid's presence inRenaissance Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 35The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to ShakespeareCambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and CultureGeneral ELJackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities, Stanford UniversityEditorial boardAnne Barton,University of CambridgeJonathan Dollimore,University of YorkMarjorie Garber,Harvard UniversityJonathan Goldberg,Johns Hopkins UniversityNancy Vickers,Bryn Mawr CollegeSince the 1970s there has been a broad and vital reinterpretation of thenature of literary texts, a move away from formalism to a sense ofliterature as an aspect of social, economic, political and cultural the earliest New Historicist work was criticized for a narrow andanecdotal view of history, it also served as an important stimulus forpost-structuralist, feminist, Marxist and psychoanalytical work, whichin turn has increasingly informed and redirected it. Recent writing onthe nature of representation, the historical construction of gender andof the concept of identity itself, on theatre as a political and economicphenomenon and on the ideologies of art generally, reveals the breadthof the