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COPYRIGHT 2002 www.wmich.edu/compdr
Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii + 220. $60.00.
Wendy Wall is very much a practitioner of "the new new historicism," as outlined in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt [1999], 1). Distinguishing "the new new historicism" from the new historicism' and cultural materialism of the 1980s and early 1990s, which subordinated the "common" or everyday to politics and elite culture (3), the editors and contributors of Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, following French theorists Michel DeCerteau and Lucien LeFebvre, expanded and explored the concept of "everydayness" as manifested in early modern British culture. Staging Domesticity follows this line of work, though its author makes an important distinction: Wall wants the "common" to remain connected to "the political." Indeed, she is adroit in analyzing both the everyday aspects of early modern drama and culture and the political hierarchies they are shaped by and articulate, embody, challenge, or subvert. While Fumerton's critique spoofs the New Historicist use of the anecdote, Wall as it were reanimates the anecdote: she explores its nooks and crannies, situating it within its publication, performance, dissemination, translation, and/or quotation history, laying it alongside myriad cultural contexts, thereby promoting it from mere "local color" to subject of study in its own right. "Thick description"...
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