Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature

Published by Amsterdam University Press 2024

Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature

Edited by: Nicholas Helms and Steve Mentz

Volume 9 in the series Environmental Humanities in Pre-Modern Cultures

https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048557608

Overview
Contents

About this book

Water and cognition seem unrelated things, the one a physical environment and the other an intellectual process. The essays in this book show how bringing these two modes together revitalizes our understanding of both. Water and especially oceanic spaces have been central to recent trends in the environmental humanities and premodern ecocriticism. Cognition, including ideas about the “extended mind” and distributed cognition, has also been important in early modern literary and cultural studies over the past few decades. This book aims to think “water” and “cognition” as distinct critical modes and also to combine them in what we term “watery thinking.” Water and Cognition brings together cognitive science and ecocriticism to ask how the environment influences how humans think, and how they think about thinking. The collection explores how water — as element, as environment, and as part of our bodies — affects the way early modern and contemporary discourses understand cognition.

Author / Editor information

Helms Nicholas :

Nic Helms is Assistant Professor of English at Plymouth State University. They are the author of Cognition, Misreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters (Palgrave, 2019) and of sundry articles and book chapters on cognition, disability, and tragedy, the most recent of which is “Seeing Brains: Shakespeare, Autism, and Self-Identification” in Redefining Disability (Brill, 2022).Mentz Steve :

Steve Mentz is Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City. He is the author of An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (Routledge, 2023), Ocean (Bloomsbury, 2020), and the editor of A Cultural History of the Sea in the Early Modern Era (Bloomsbury, 2021), among other books, chapters, and articles.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	1
Table of Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	5
List of Illustrations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	7
Acknowledgments and Dedication Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	9
Introduction : Watery Thinking: Minds and Water In and Beyond the Early Modern Period Nic Helms and Steve Mentz Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	11
Part 1 Drowning on Stage
1. Muddying the Waters: Thinking Thinking in Watery Context with Hamlet McKenna Rose Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	29
2. Ophelia with Spectator: Hamlet and Watery Cognition Lianne Habinek Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
3. Monsters of the Deep: What Watery Dreams May Come in Shakespeare’s Richard III Tony Perrello Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
4. Stink or Swim: Knee-deep in Marlowe’s Edward II Myra E. Wright Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	91
Part 2 Fluid Metaphors
5. Richard of Gloucester’s Elemental Thinking: Water and Sovereignty in Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy Benjamin Bertram Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	113
6. The Sea of the Mind in Early Modern Poetry Douglas Clark Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	137
7. Tears, Rain, and Shame : King Lear, Masculine Vulnerability, and Environmental Crisis Jennifer Hamilton Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
Part 3 Forms of Water
8. Flake: The Shapes of Snow in Early Modern Culture Lowell Duckert Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	177
9. “No darkness but Ignorance” : Thinking Foggily in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama Gwilym Jones Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
10. Speaking Water and Seeping Memory in Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion William Kerwin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	217
Part 4 Submersive Tendencies
11. Estuarial Rage and Resistance in Pulter’s “The Complaint of Thames” Dyani Johns Taff Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	235
12. Jurisdiction : Oceanic Erasure and Indigenous Subjection in Dryden’s Amboyna Benjamin D. VanWagoner Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	257
13. Thinking with the Ocean as Decolonial Strategy : Memory, Loss, and the Underwater Archive in Shakespeare’s The Tempest Sandra Young Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	283
Afterword: Thinking Water Evelyn Tribble Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	303
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	309

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 302
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 9
Keywords: Blue humanities; cognition; early modern literature; science; ecocriticsm

eBook

Published: March 14, 2024
ISBN: 9789048557608