Refusing to Behave in Early Modern Literature

Laura Seymour is Lecturer in English at The Queen’s College, Oxford. She researches neurodiversity, Shakespeare, and early modern literature. She is the author of Refusing to Behave in Early Modern Literature (EUP, 2022) and Shakespeare and Neurodiversity (2024). Her work on neurodivergence, cognition, and early modern literature have appeared most recently in journals like Shakespeare, Renaissance Studies, Bunyan Studies, Marvell Studies, and Studies in English Literature as well as in edited volumes. With Professor Siân Grønlie, she founded and co-leads the project Neurodiversity at Oxford which aims to connect, celebrate, and empower Oxford University’s neurodiverse community of staff and students https://neurodiversityoxford.web.ox.ac.uk . Her current project, “New Understandings of Hamlet”, centers lived experience of neurodivergence, suicidal ideation, and mental illness in reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and is funded by the British Academy.

Seymour’s brilliant book exfoliates texts to show how the kinaesthetic experience of the characters can be written to evoke the reader’s kinaesthetic experience. Reading her reading makes us aware of the ways our body is involved in making meaning while we read. Her book is a model of how to incorporate research on embodied cognition into literary studies.

• Acknowledgements Introduction: The Body At Play in Early Modern Texts Chapter 1: Ungracious Grace: Proprioception and Staging Taste in Thomas Dekker’s If This Be Not a Good Play The Devil is In It The Devil Saying Grace: Folklore and Oxymoron A Gust of Wind that Fans the Fire: Monks Hotting Up Mistrusting the Self Conclusion Chapter 2: Walking without God — (mis)learning through the gait in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 and 1604) and James Mabbe’s The Rogue (1622) Guzmán’s Pedagogical Texts: God and the Beggar’s Book Conclusion: Against Learning – Guzmán and the Widow Chapter 3: Plain Plasticity— Thomas Ellwood’s The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (1714) Masculinity and Self-Shaping: A Simple Perspective? Conclusion Chapter 4: Chaste and Silent – Again. Vitality and the bound and loosed body in I.T.’s Grim the Collier of Croydon; or, The Devil and His Dame (c.1600) Tyed Tongues Vitality: Outside of Language Conclusion