Description:
Early Modern Others highlights instances of challenges to misogyny, racism, atheism, and antisemitism in the early modern period. Through deeply historicising early modern literature and looking at its political and social contexts, Peter C. Herman explores how early modern authors challenged the biases and prejudices of their age.
Review Quotes:
"This compact yet wide-ranging book is fundamentally concerned with how early modern literature is inherently dialogic, and Herman is invested in the ways in which issues of gender, race, religion, and status are always in a continual process of negotiation both in and beyond the theatres. The book is remarkable in terms of the inverse relationship between the text's size and the topics it attempts to cover. . . . This, in the end, is an ambitious book that makes us conscious of the perils of a univocal reading of literature, and which ultimately provides a very different voice in the context of current critical debates in higher education and academic scholarship around issues of racism, identity, prejudice, and discrimination."
-Bethan Davies, The Spenser Review
[T]his is a valuable and timely work, one that offers a perspective on early modern literature and society rarely discussed'.
-Patrick J. McGrath, Milton Quarterly