TY - BOOK ID - 77895744 TI - Discovering the subject in Renaissance England PY - 1998 SN - 0511585500 0511005423 9780511005428 052162021X 0521090717 PB - Cambridge, U.K. New York Cambridge University Press DB - UniCat KW - English literature. KW - British literature KW - Inklings (Group of writers) KW - Nonsense Club (Group of writers) KW - Order of the Fancy (Group of writers) KW - English literature KW - Subjectivity in literature. KW - Subject (Philosophy) in literature. KW - Difference (Psychology) in literature. KW - Knowledge, Theory of, in literature. KW - Secrecy in literature. KW - Renaissance KW - Self in literature. KW - History and criticism. KW - Arts and Humanities KW - Literature UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77895744 AB - When Hamlet complains that Guildenstern 'would pluck out the heart of [his] mystery', he imagines an encounter that recurs insistently in the discourses of early modern England. The struggle by one man to discover the secrets in another's heart is rehearsed not only in plays but in legal records, correspondence, philosophical writing and contemporary social description. In this book Elizabeth Hanson argues that the construction of other people as objects of discovery signalled a reconceptualizing of the 'subject' in both the political and philosophical sense of the term. She examines the records of state torture, plays by Shakespeare and Jonson, 'cony-catching' pamphlets and Francis Bacon's philosophical writing, to demonstrate that the subject was both under suspicion and empowered in this period. Her account revises earlier attempts to locate the emergence of modern subjectivity in the Renaissance, arguing for a more nuanced and localized understanding of the relationship with its medieval past. ER -