Worldmaking takes many forms in early modern literature and thus challenges any single interpretive approach. The essays in this collection investigate the material stuff of the world in Spenser, Cary, and Marlowe; the sociable bonds of authorship, sexuality, and sovereignty in Shakespeare and others; and the universal status of spirit, gender, and empire in the worlds of Vaughan, Donne, and the dastan (tale) of Chouboli, a Rajasthani princess. Together, these essays make the case that to address what it takes to make a world in the early modern period requires the kinds of thinking exemplified by theory.
About the author
Jonathan Goldberg is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Emory University. His many books include Come As You Are, After Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; Saint Marks: Words, Images, and What Persists; Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility; and Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. His writing centers on early modernity but ranges from Sappho and Willa Cather to Patricia Highsmith and Todd Haynes in exploring questions of materiality and sexuality.