Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Men Who Weep and Wail: Masculinity and Emotion in Sidney's <i>New Arcadia</i>

Author's Introduction In this Teaching and Learning Guide I include my essay ‘Men Who Weep and Wail: Masculinity and Emotion in Sidney's New Arcadia ’ in a Sixteenth‐Century Major Writers course on Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare aimed at upper‐level undergraduates and graduate students. This course examines poetry and prose by these writers in roughly chronological order and offers a selection of primary and secondary readings that situates these texts in their literary and historical context and in relation to recent critical works on emotion and masculinity, subjects that have generated considerable critical interest over the past decade. Studies of emotion, which the early moderns described as bodily passions, have become popular in literary studies, cultural history, philosophy, and anthropology among other disciplines. The growing interest of literary critics in the issue of masculinity complements the sustained critical interest in femininity and feminism in gender studies. The broadening of the field of gender studies to include men's as well as women's studies challenges the misleading association of men with the mind and women with the body and avoids perpetuating the illusion that men are the ungendered sex. Recently, literary critics have explored the topic of masculinity extensively with respect to Shakespeare's plays but less so in relation to poetry and prose by his contemporaries. In my essay on emotionally expressive men in Sidney's New Arcadia I demonstrate when, where, how, and to what extent male expressions of desire, grief, anger, melancholy, and pity function as sources of strength rather than weakness. This essay thereby reveals that stoicism and self‐restraint are not always masculine qualities and that emotional demonstrativeness and hysteria are not necessarily feminine or debilitating traits in early modern texts. Author Recommends: General Early Modern Criticism: Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion , eds. Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. Sullivan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) provides twenty‐eight original essays that examine major poems by Spenser, Sidney, Wroth, Marlowe, and Shakespeare among other sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century writers in relation to topics ranging from literary genres, modes, and Petrarchism to the body, sexuality, and homoeroticism. Secondary Works on Emotion: The interdisciplinary collection Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd‐Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) focuses on the meanings and representations of emotion in Renaissance literature, music, and art. In Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Michael Schoenfeldt explores the close link between psychological inwardness and corporeal processes in English Renaissance literature that resulted from the early modern medical paradigm of the passions as governed by the bodily humors. In The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992) Juliana Schiesari argues that melancholia often functions as a sign of elite exceptionality in men but that women's grief is often a figure for the illness of depression and is thereby disparaged. In ‘ The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia and Its (Com)Passionate Women Readers’, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) Mary Ellen Lamb demonstrates that Sir Philip Sidney presents passion, which is often associated with feminine displays of affect, as a positive trait that motivates heroic constancy for both sexes in the New Arcadia . Secondary Works on Masculinity: Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) by Bruce Smith provides a vital, exemplary introduction to the study of masculinity and early modern theories of the bodily humors and gender. In Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Mark Breitenberg examines the dialectic of anxiety and desire for masculine subjects in works by Shakespeare, Bacon, Burton, and women writers. In ‘Early Modern Masculinities and The Faerie Queene ’, English Literary Renaissance 35.2 (2005): 210–47 Lisa Celovksy addresses the gap in gender and feminist approaches to Spenser studies by examining what it means to be a man in his epic romance. General Reference: The Spenser Encylopedia , eds. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990) is an indispensable reference tool offering over 700 entries on Spenser's life, works, and literary influences. Online Materials: See the portraits of Queen Elizabeth I and the Armada Portrait in particular in relation to her ‘Speech to the Troops at Tilbury’ at http://www.biocrawler.com/encyclopedia/Elizabeth_I_of_England . The Sidney Homepage at http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/sidney provides links to The Sidney Journal , the Sidney‐Spenser Discussion List, and on‐line resources on Sidney's texts, biographies, and bibliographies of literary criticism on his works. See the Sir Philip Sidney World Bibliography at http://bibs.slu.edu/sidney/index.html for annotated bibliographies about Sidney's life and work. The Edmund Spenser Homepage at http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenser/main.htm offers a biography and bibliography about Spenser as well as useful links to Spenser journals, discussion lists, and other Renaissance authors, journals, research libraries, and archives. See the Edmund Spenser World Bibliography at http://bibs.slu.edu/spenser/index.html for bibliographies, abstracts, and book reviews from Spenser Studies and The Spenser Review . See the Images of St. George Throughout the Ages: Western Art in relation to Redcrosse's battle with the dragon in Book I of <jats:itali

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