Your purchase has been completed. Your documents are now available to view.
Changing the currency will empty your shopping cart.
In medieval and early modern Europe, marriage treaties were a perennial feature of the diplomatic landscape. In After Lavinia, John Watkins traces the history of the practice, focusing on the unusually close relationship between diplomacy and literary production in Western Europe from antiquity through the seventeenth century.
John Watkins is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He is the coauthor of Shakespeare’s Foreign World’s: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age, also from Cornell. He is also the author of Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty and The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic.
"After Lavinia is an excellent book: extremely ambitious, successful, and important. Its originality is one of its great strengths, along with its clarity and breadth. John Watkins's topic is a massive one but one virtually never studied in this way. He writes elegantly, and his often complex arguments are clearly presented. This book makes contributions to a whole raft of academic fields—comparative literature, diplomatic history, political history, cultural history, gender studies, medieval studies, English studies, French studies, Renaissance studies, even classics. It should find a broad readership; I predict that it will garner much praise as a major contribution to our understanding of the intersection of gender, political history, and literature. The fascinating climax to After Lavinia is a set of original and persuasive readings of historical tragedies by the major European dramatists of the period—Shakespeare, Corneille, and Racine—in which Watkins shows with exciting clarity and detail the shifts in emphasis and affective power that accompany the changing role of the queen as political actor—and spell her demise as a figure of diplomatic agency."
Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product.
