Distinctive English identities have been constructed in a great variety of texts of the early modern period in Britain. The representation of these identities is the focus of this volume. It contains analyses of a range of texts and their “construction of the other,” as the title of this book reveals. This 228-page volume thereby presents critical perspectives on issues surrounding textual productions as well as reproductions of the so-called self as opposed to the other. It was published after a five-year research project in which scholars from across Europe sought to achieve a greater understanding of, as the editors note, “the textual construction of alterity, otherness, and identity in the early modern period” (vii). The volume comprises a total of fourteen contributions. The brief foreword provides the reader with information about the volume’s aims as well as the research background. It is highlighted that the essays seek to examine the construction of English identities from “a cultural, historical, epistemological, religious, aesthetic and ideological point of view” (vii). This aim is indeed achieved in the essays that follow.
In the first contribution, Jesús López-Peláez Casellas provides a clear overview of the volume’s general topics of alterity, otherness, and identity. Additionally, a historical background is provided while exemplifying how the early modern period in England from 1485 to 1660 shaped the development of a new type of “early modern mentality” (3). The author, for instance, refers to William Camden’s Britannia and shows how his narrative texts illustrate an “early modern attempt at symbiosis, operating at two levels: . . . a symbiosis of contradictory and conflictive space . . . and [a space] of its uncivilized (extra-cultural) inhabitants” (2). The last part of the introduction presents a very valuable outline of the subsequent contributions.
In the following thirteen essays, scholars examine texts with regard to the construction of alterity and otherness. Early modern texts include a variety of different types, ranging from drama, travel narratives, historical accounts, and opera (the libretto of Rossini’s opera Otello). The different English identities that evolved from these texts cover identities from perspectives including gender, the economy, and religion. An insightful essay by Jüri Talvet, called “‘Self’ and ‘Other’: Thinking with Montaigne, Liiv and Lotman,” develops Lotman’s ideas and concludes with the convincing argument that “a creative mind and creative culture have to enter into an open contact with the ‘other’” (26). In the following paper, “Alterity and Its Reflection in Shakespeare’s Plays,” Rüdiger Ahrens thoroughly examines Shakespeare’s plays and rightly observes that “they must be considered to be plurivocal,” while at the same time “maintaining a certain kind of unity” (44).
Shakespeare’s works are in focus in further contributions. John Drakakis, for example, precisely analyzes intertextual relations between Othello and The Merchant of Venice. Ali S. Zaidi focuses on the ethical implications of power in Edward III. In his essay “Hungry Swine and Politic Worms: Humanist Identity and Animal Tropes from Amleth to Hamlet,” Zenón Luis-Martínez investigates specific aspects of language and the presentation of animal imagery in Shakespeare’s Hamlet — an in-depth analysis that adds to the volume’s diversity by looking at forms of otherness with respect to the conception of people as animal matter.
The issue of gender is addressed in two essays following Ahrens: Yolanda Caballero looks at plays by Manley, Pix, and Trotter and their (common) development as “a unique constellation of transnational feminist ideas” (71). Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, in “Reconceiving Gender Alterity,” discusses the significance of women writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and presents the following insightful findings: “Although certainly to a large extent women authors continued to be Othered, they also shared in rich partisan and cultural networks whose ongoing debates they enriched with their thoughts, their words, and their lives” (84).
The additional essays in this volume by Eroulla Demetriou and Cinta Zunino-Garrido, Luciano García García, Andrew Monnickendam, José Ruiz Mas, and Rafael Vélez provide further clear-sighted analyses, for instance, of a play by Robert Wilson, the term Moor in secondary texts, stories of Nicosia, and the Spanish identity known as the Black Legend. All contributions are ordered alphabetically and therefore the close thematic relation is not evident at first glance. Yet, overall, this volume is well structured and provides the reader with different perspectives by renowned scholars. In sum, it sheds a diverse light upon how the other as well as the self have been constructed in literature, making the analytic diversity of this volume unique.
