In Performance and Religion in Early Modern England, I seek to expand our view of “the theatrical.” By revealing the creative and phenomenal ways that performances reshaped religious material in early modern England, I offer a more inclusive and integrative view of performance culture. This book argues that early modern theatrical and religious practices are better …
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“You do not yet recognize as you are recognized; you do not yet see as you are seen.” This statement could have been written by Hobbes, Hegel, or Levinas to describe the struggle for recognition that is at the heart of modern moral philosophy. In fact, it comes from the medieval mystic, Hugh of St. …
This book, which I co-edited with Julia Reinhard Lupton, celebrates the theatrical excitement and philosophical meanings of human interaction in Shakespeare. On stage and in life, the face is always window and mirror, representation and presence. It examines the emotional and ethical surplus that appears between faces in the activity and performance of human encounter …
The religious turn in literary studies has challenged the traditional focus on authorized and institutional religion in literature, and it also has expanded what counts toward literary histories of devotional practice. Scholars of literature and scholars of religion share resources, drawing especially on the local, environmental, and material histories of the sacred. As a result, …
The critical strategy of imagining literature’s sacramental, incarnational, and eucharistic capabilities has become increasingly popular over the last several decades’ turn to religion in literary studies. Yet these sacramental lenses remain predominantly undefined. Is to read a poem sacramentally to imagine God’s incarnational presence by analogy or in some more literal or perhaps miraculous way? …
Sincerity is a complex and rich subject of literary history. For one, does it even belong to literary history? One could easily imagine histories of sincerity from perspectives like the theory of self-consciousness in German Idealist thought or in Rousseau’s notion of selfhood and self-truth. We can also look farther back toAugustine’s Confessions or to …