The shattering of the self : violence, subjectivity, and early modern texts /

In this interesting study of violence in early modern English drama, Marshall (Rhodes College) sets out to demonstrate how these texts offer their audiences an experience of psychic fracture that results from conflicting yet coexistent perceptions of subjectivity: a union of an older, established sense of individuality and a newer set of forces producing a new, emerging sense of early modern subjectivity. Five chapters bring together examples of violence, often with an erotically charged emphasis, and address questions related to subjectivity and identity. Enriched by conjunctions of psychoanalytic theory and historicist methodologies in relation to the governing issue of "the Renaissance impulse to negate selfhood," the subject matter includes, for example, Petrarch's paradoxical figurative conflations of love and violence, Foxe's Acts and Moments's articulations of the jouissance of martyrology, and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus's ethics of pornography. Though topically similar to Marshall Grossman's study of subjectivity in Renaissance poetry, The Story of All Things (CH, Mar'99), and Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz's edited collection on subjects of desire, Desire in the Renaissance (CH, May'95), this relatively original and provocative study has much to offer. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, scholars, and teachers of early modern literature and contemporary theoretical and cultural studies. C. S. Cox University of Pittsburgh