Early Modern Others

Peter C. Herman is Professor of English Literature at San Diego State University. He is the author of Unspeakable: Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11 (2020), Destabilizing Milton: "Paradise Lost" and the Poetics of Incertitude (2005), and Royal Poetrie: Monarchic Verse and the Political Imaginary of Early Modern England (2010), among other books.

"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

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1: Thomas More’s Utopia and the "New World"Chapter 2: "I am no child, no babe": The Shrew PlaysChapter 3: "That’s More than We Know": The Crisis of the 1590s in Deloney, Dekker, and ShakespeareChapter 4: The Circulation of Atheism in Early Modern England: Tamburlaine, Selimus, and King Lear Chapter 5: The Religious "Other" in Early Modern England: The Jew of Malta, The Merchant of Venice, and The RenegadoChapter 6: Othello and London’s Africans Works CitedIndex