TY - JOUR
AU - Munro, Lucy
AB - 758 • Reviews we enjoy what we know is bad for us and celebrate what we are expected to mourn. Art objects— plays, songs, photos, cartoons, and poems—are among the materials Daniel mines to make this point. But in wresting self-harm away from the ‘tragic allure of self-destruction’ (p. 220) afforded by tragedy and instead exploring ‘deflationary comedic resistance’ (p. 220), Daniel mutes the dramatic bells and whistles of self-killing, allowing us to hear pensive pleasure or unexpected amusement. This monograph is of value to students and teachers of early modern literature and culture, yet no review can adequately encapsulate the experience of reading it. Like the joy of the worm, the book itself evades the expected experience of its genre (the academic monograph) and instead offers—less dramatically than self-killing but with notable acuity—the indulgence of playful prose and the invitation to ponder life and death with indecorous delight. Many of its findings enlighten us about living as much as about dying. We are made aware of the structural bearings that make life possible: its sources of nourishment, its transactional register, its social bonds, and its insistence on joy as a possibility even, and perhaps most critically, in the 
TI - Christopher Highley. Blackfriars in Early Modern London: Theater, Church, and Neighborhood
JO - The Review of English Studies
DO - 10.1093/res/hgad057
DA - 2023-05-19
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/christopher-highley-blackfriars-in-early-modern-london-theater-church-ro5QLQsxuA
SP - 758
EP - 760
VL - 74
IS - 316
DP - DeepDyve
ER -