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  1. Home
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  3. The Performance of Nobility in Early Modern European Literature
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2009
Print publication year:
1999
Online ISBN:
9780511483899
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483899
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, Renaissance and Early Modern Literature, European Literature, European Studies
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (33)
Information

Book description

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 Siècle, 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.

Reviews

"An excellent resource for graduate students, research faculty, and social and literary historians." Choice

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