Refiguring Mimesis: Representation in Early Modern Literature, Jonathan HOLMES et Adrian STREETE (eds.)

HOLMES, Jonathan and Adrian STREETE (eds.), Refiguring Mimesis: Representation in Early Modern Literature, University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005, 240 p.

ISBN 1-902806-35-2

The early modern period is characterised by a crisis of representational practice. Fuelled by both the iconoclastic impulses of reformed religion and profound political and economic changes, the literature of the period negotiates an acute cultural engagement with the discourses of representation. Over the last three decades, early modern scholarship has sought to define the early modern subject in relation to a careful historicism as well as to a materialist analysis of cultural production.

At the same time, continental thought has responded to our own late-capitalist crisis in representation, under the terms poststructuralism and postmodernism. This response has been characterised by a move away from theories of artistic or authorial expressivity and a renewed interest (logical in retrospect) in the much older concept of mimesis. Whether it is in the writing of Theodore Adorno, Jean Baudrillard, or Jacques Derrida himself, mimesis is firmly back on the philosophical agenda.

However, in the Anglo-American critical tradition the assumption that mimesis stands for an epistemologically transparent 'reflection of reality' remains almost unconsciously ingrained in much critical discourse: the shadow cast by Erich Auerbach's seminal study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (first published 50 years ago) is a long one. This volume aims to refigure the Auerbachian hegemony by re-focussing on the irreducibility of the mimetic as a philosophical idea.

Dr Jonathan Holmes is currently lecturer in Drama and English at Royal Holloway, Univ. of London. He has published articles in journals including Shakespeare Survey and New Theatre Quarterly and is the author of the forthcoming Merely Players: actors' accounts of playing Shakespeare.

Dr Adrian Streete is a lecturer in English at Queen's University, Belfast. He has published work on Marlowe, Shakespeare, Calvin and early modern sign theory.