William W. E. Slights - Böcker

Managing Readers explores the fascinating interchange between text and margin, authorship and readership in early modern England. Printed marginalia did more than any other material feature of book production in the period between 1540 and 1700 to shape the experience of reading. William W. E. Slights considers overlooked evidence of the ways that early modern readers were instructed to process information, to contest opinions, and to make themselves into fully responsive consumers of texts. The recent revolution in the protocols of reading brought on by computer technology has forced questions about the nature of book-based knowledge in our global culture. Managing Readers traces changes in the protocols of annotation and directed reading--from medieval religious manuscripts and Renaissance handbooks for explorers, rhetoricians, and politicians to the elegant clear-text editions of the Enlightenment and the hypertexts of our own time. Developing such concepts as textual authority, generic difference, and reader-response, Slights demonstrates that printed marginalia were used to confirm the authority of the text and to undermine it, to supplement "dark" passages, and to colonize strategic hermeneutic spaces. The book contains twenty-two illustrations of pages from rare-book archives that make immediately clear how distinctive the management of the reading experience was during the first century-and-a-half of printing in England. William W. E. Slights is Professor of English, University of Saskatchewan. He is also author of Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy.

When Hamlet says he 'wears' Horatio in his 'heart of hearts', he is claiming that the strongest bonds between people are forged, stored, and understood in the heart. The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare sets out to trace the sources and subsequent impact of Hamlet's conviction. The book presents the case that by studying the interlocking anatomical, religious, and literary discourses of the heart between 1550 and 1650 we can open a new window on the culture that produced such works as The Faerie Queene, Catholic and Protestant emblem books, George Herbert's lyrics, and William Harvey's treatise on the circulation of the blood. By crossing several disciplinary boundaries and combining the material with the metaphorical, the book identifies a complex set of cardiological concerns in the dramatic works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

When Hamlet says he 'wears' Horatio in his 'heart of hearts', he is claiming that the strongest bonds between people are forged, stored, and understood in the heart. The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare sets out to trace the sources and subsequent impact of Hamlet's conviction. The book presents the case that by studying the interlocking anatomical, religious, and literary discourses of the heart between 1550 and 1650 we can open a new window on the culture that produced such works as The Faerie Queene, Catholic and Protestant emblem books, George Herbert's lyrics, and William Harvey's treatise on the circulation of the blood. By crossing several disciplinary boundaries and combining the material with the metaphorical, the book identifies a complex set of cardiological concerns in the dramatic works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.