Immateriality and Early Modern English Literature

James A. Knapp is Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in the English Department at Loyola University Chicago. His work focuses on the intersections of philosophy, literature, and visual culture in early modern Britain. He is the author of Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England (2003) and Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser (2011), and his essays on early modern literature and culture have appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, ELH, Criticism, and numerous essay collections.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Shakespeare’s Naught1. Immateriality and the Language of ThingsPart One: Being2. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth’: Material and Immaterial Substance and Early Modern Ontology3. ‘For I must nothing be’: Richard II and the Immateriality of Self4. ‘’Tis insensible then?’: Concept and Action in 1 Henry IVPart Two: Believing5. The Visible and the Invisible: Seeing the Earthly—Believing the Spiritual6. ‘When though knowest this, thou knowest’: Intention, Intuition, and Temporality in Donne’s Anatomy of the World7. ‘a brittle crazy glass’: George Herbert and the Experience of the DivinePart Three: Thinking8. Cognition and its Objects, or Ideas and the Substance of Spirit(s)9. ‘Thinking makes it so’: Mind, Body, and Spirit in The Rape of Lucrece, Hamlet, and Much Ado About Nothing10. ‘Neither Fish nor Flesh, nor Good Red Herring’: Phenomenality, Representation, and Experience in The TempestCoda

For those with an interest in the early modern period’s negotiations of alternative, sometimes contradictory, forms of knowledge, Immateriality and Early Modern English Literature is an indispensable resource. Knapp’s monograph is to be admired for its careful philological excavations and close reading of a vast intellectual tradition that was so readily apparent to early modern thinkers.