Bookshelf
| can't find it |

| browse books |
books
 

| book details |

Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity, & Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture

By (author) Brian Cummings

| on special |

normal price: R 1 729.95

Price: R 1 642.95


| book description |

Since the nineteenth century it has been assumed that the concept of personal identity in the early modern period is bound up with secularization. Indeed, many explanations of the emergence of modernity have been based on this thesis, in which Shakespeare as a secular author has played a central role. However, the idea of secularization is now everywhere under threat. The secularity of modern society is less apparent than it was a generation ago. Shakespeare, too, has come to be seen in a religious perspective. What happens to human identity in this different framework? Mortal Thoughts asks what selfhood looks like if we do not assume that an idea of the self could only come into being as a result of an emptying out of a religious framework. It does so by examining human mortality. What it is to be human, and how a life is framed by its ending, are issues that cross religious confessions in early modernity, and interrogate the sacred and secular divide. A series of chapters examines literature and art in relation to concepts such as conscience, martyrdom, soliloquy, luck, suicide, and embodiment. Religious and philosophical creativity are revealed as poised around anxieties about finitude and contingency, challenging conventional divisions between kinds of literary and artistic endeavour. Mortal Thoughts considers incipient genres of life writing (More, Foxe, and Montaigne) and life drawing (Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien) in relation to dramatic representation and literary narration (Shakespeare, Donne, Milton). In the process it asks whether the problem of human identity rewrites historical boundaries.

| product details |



Normally shipped | This title will be printed on demand for your order. Delivery will be 6 weeks or less.
Publisher | Oxford University Press
Published date | 11 Oct 2018
Language |
Format | Paperback / softback
Pages | 384
Dimensions | 219 x 147 x 21mm (L x W x H)
Weight | 478g
ISBN | 978-0-1988-3118-1
Readership Age |
BISAC |


| other options |



Normally shipped | Available from overseas. Usually dispatched in 14 days
Readership Age |
Normal Price | R 2 001.95
Price | R 1 901.95 | on special |



| your trolley |

To view the items in your trolley please sign in.

| sign in |

| specials |

The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes

William Kelleher Storey
Paperback / softback
528 pages
was: R 425.95
now: R 382.95
Usually dispatched in 6-12 days

This first comprehensive biography of Cecil Rhodes in a generation illuminates Rhodes’s vision for the expansion of imperialism in southern Africa, connecting politics and industry to internal development, and examines how this fueled a lasting, white-dominated colonial society.

The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future

Mustafa Suleyman
Paperback / softback
352 pages
was: R 295.95
now: R 265.95
Stock is usually dispatched in 6-12 days from date of order


Survive the AI Apocalypse: A guide for solutionists

Bronwyn Williams
Paperback / softback
232 pages
was: R 340.95
now: R 306.95
Stock is usually dispatched in 6-12 days from date of order

Look around you is anything real or normal any more? News, images and videos created by AI are everywhere.

The Memory Collectors: A Novel

Dete Meserve
Paperback / softback
320 pages


Enquiries only