Reading the Road, from Shakespeare's Crossways to Bunyan's Highways

Journal Data

TypeSOURCE_BOOK
PublisherEdinburgh University Press (GB)
ISBN-139781474454131
Open LibraryOL21655306W
Total publications5
Coverage period2019 - 2020
LanguageEN

This collection of essays examines the most influential meanings of roads in early modern literature and culture. It explores the place of the road in the early modern imagination and so opens windows on a geography which is central to all conceptions of movement. They also shed new light on perhaps the most astonishing achievement of early modern plays: their use of one small, bare space to suggest an amazing variety of physical and potentially metaphysical locations. Chapters are grouped under three headings: ‘Shakespeare’s Roads’, ‘The Embodied Road’ and ‘Writing the Road’. These allow particular angles of insight into early modern historical and cultural contexts of physical and imaginary roads and include topics as various as the economics of the early modern road network in Shakespeare’s plays, the implications of the siting of theatres on London’s roads, Shakespeare’s allusions to the dangerous nature of crossroads, the poetry of staging roads, dramatic depictions of travelling communities and masterless fools, the material effects of the physical road in depictions of pilgrimage, and both literal and figurative roads in gendered perceptions of mobility. The complex picture of cultural conceptions and ideologies of the early modern road that emerges enhances our understanding of early modern subjectivities.