English Department

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Browsing English Department by Author "Campana, Joseph"

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    The Bee and the Sovereign? Political Entomology and the Problem of Scale
    (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) Campana, Joseph
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    Boy Toys and Liquid Joys: Pleasure and Power in the Bower of Bliss
    (The University of Chicago Press, 2009) Campana, Joseph
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    Killing Shakespeare's Children: The Cases of Richard III and King John
    (Taylor & Francis, 2007) Campana, Joseph
    This essay explores a series of affective, sexual and temporal disturbances that Shakespeare's child characters create on the early modern stage and that lead these characters often to their deaths. It does so by turning to the murdered princes of Richard III and the ultimately extinguished boy-king Arthur of King John. A pervasive sentimentality about childhood shapes the way audiences and critics have responded to Shakespeare's children by rendering invisible complex and discomfiting erotic and emotional investments in childhood innocence. While Richard III subjects such sentimentality to its analytic gaze, King John explores extreme modes of affect and sexuality associated with childhood. For all of the pragmatic political reasons to kill Arthur, he is much more than an inconvenient dynastic obstacle. Arthur functions as the central node of networks of seduction, the catalyst of morbid displays of affect, and the signifier of future promise as threateningly mutable. King John and Richard III typify Shakespeare's larger dramatic interrogation of emergent notions of childhood and of contradictory notions of temporality, an interrogation conducted by the staging of uncanny, precocious, and ill-fated child roles.
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    On Not Defending Poetry: Spenser, Suffering, and the Energy of Affect
    (The Modern Language Association of America, 2005) Campana, Joseph
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    Shakespeare's Children
    (Wiley, 2011) Campana, Joseph
    Shakespeare had a thing for children. Ann Blake counts 30, Mark Heberle 39, Mark Lawhorn 45, and Carol Chillington Rutter counts well over 50 child parts. What it means that Shakespeare included more child figures in his plays and poems than his contemporaries remains an incitement to conversation as a recent burst of scholarship makes evident. That this interest follows the institutionalization of the study of childrenﾒs literature and the formation of childhood studies programs is instructive. Approaches taken by humanities scholars may not hold the same political sway as psychological or sociological studies, some of which have real implications for the policies and standards that impact the lives of actual children. But since attempts to tell the history of childhood often produce fantasies of the ideal, sentimental child, the works of Shakespeare offer an opportunity to understand constructions and fictions of childhood in a time of the rapidly shifting cultural and historical valuation of children. This essay examines central questions and problems in the study of early modern child figures, reviews past approaches to and recent publications on early modern children, suggests topics yet to be explored in the context of the child figures of Shakespeare and his contemporaries (sexuality, temporality, sovereignty, humanity, and economy), and concludes by suggesting we think of Shakespeareﾒs children not as strictly historical or affective objects but, rather, as figures pressed to signify with respect to cultural expectations of value, sovereignty, and futurity.
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    The Child's Two Bodies: Shakespeare, Sovereignty, and the End of Succession
    (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) Campana, Joseph
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    The State Of England's Camp: Courtesans, curses, and the violence of style in The Unfortunate Traveller
    (Taylor & Francis, 2007) Campana, Joseph
    Thomas Nashe's mystifying The Unfortunate Traveller offers few clues to explain its fundamental purpose, its grotesque depictions of violence, its outrageous rhetoric, or its relationship to forms of linguistic, literary, and social authority. While this text begins amidst Henry VIII's conquests, one soon realizes that ‘the state of England's camp’ in Nashe's early modernity pertains both to the military encampment and to incidences of outrageous, ironic theatrical citation that occur within those encampments and that are now associated with the term ‘camp.’ As Jack Wilton strays from the dangerous pranks of England's camps to the degenerate pleasures of Italy, his textual performance oscillates between dissembling, feminine persuasion, associated with the courtesan (who was, for Nashe, a figure of the writer) and brutal, unforgiving masculine force, associated with the vengeful curses of the blasphemer. Nashe's prose explores degraded forms of orality (speaking, tasting, and eating) with a theatrical morbidity that reveals the subject of The Unfortunate Traveller to be the development of a style to balance the limitless violence of rhetorical assertion with the effeminizing effects of commercial publication. As Nashe's parodic compensations for the lived contradictions of gender, commerce, and writing backfire spectacularly, the style and subject of The Unfortunate Traveller truly emerge.