Bawdry, Cuckoldry, and Usury in Early Modernity and Postmodernity

Abstract

A mid themyriad tribulations of their professional lives, scholars of English Renaissance literature can take comfort from the knowledge that their specialist expertise is badly, even desperately, needed by contemporary society. The refusal of society’s regnant powers to acknowledge that fact only confirms it. The postmodern experience is irreducibly textual. Those best able to analyze, manipulate, and expound textuality are best equipped to understand the postmodern condition. It is their responsibility to evaluate in ethical terms the hegemony of performative representation, which is postmodernity’s definitive characteristic. The notion that ideal essences inform the appearances of senseperception seems eccentric today. The binary opposition between essence and appearance has been deconstructed, along with the polarities between substance and accident, matter and idea, subject and object. The dialectic of sign and referent has been displaced into the depthless differance of