An international group of scholars working in early modern English literature and culture have been invited to reflect upon one of the most dynamic dialectics of the period: the opposition between the concept “human, humanist, humanism” versus the concept “barbarous, barbarian, barbarism.” The result is Writing the Other: Humanism versus Barbarism in Tudor England.
The essays in this volume range widely across the literary and cultural field mapped out by this opposition, thus revealing a rich multiplicity of voices and approaches to one of the fundamental processes by which self-fashioning and also “other-fashioning” operated during the Tudor reign. The focus moves from England to North Africa, to Hungary and to the New World in its panoramic display of the vast theatre in which identities were forged.
The volume as a whole demonstrates how the cultural OtherOther was as much invented as described—“forged” in the sense, perhaps, of “counterfeited” —during the early modern and especially the Tudor period. This invention occasionally led to the demonisation of the object of its gaze, at other times its rehumanisation; sometimes we may detect evidence of a painful act of distortion, and at others we see the purposeful and profitable creation of a self-identityidentity with an eye on the rhetorical, religious, poetic, national expectations of the readers in the new context of print culture. But everywhere we witness the remarkable energy and fertility of the primary opposition which gives this collection its central theme.
