Shades Of Difference

Description:

"In Shades of Difference, Sujata Iyengar explores the cultural mythologies of skin color in a period during which colonial expansion and the slave trade introduced Britons to more dark-skinned persons than at any other time in their history. Looking to texts as divergent as sixteenth-century Elizabethan erotic verse, seventeenth-century lyrics, and Restoration prose romances, Iyengar considers the construction of race during the early modern period without oversimplifying the emergence of race as a color-coded classification or a black/white opposition. Rather, "race," embodiment, and skin color are examined in their multiple contexts - historical, geographical, and literary. Iyengar engages works that have not previously been incorporated into discussions of the formation of race, such as Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" and Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis." By rethinking the emerging early modern connections between the notions of race, skin color, and gender, Shades of Difference furthers an ongoing discussion with originality and impeccable scholarship."--BOOK JACKET.

subjects: Blacks in literature,  Difference (Psychology) in literature,  English literature,  History,  History and criticism,  Human skin color,  Human skin color in literature,  Literature and society,  Mythology in literature,  Race in literature,  Race relations,  Social aspects of Human skin color,  English literature, history and criticism, early modern, 1500-1700,  Difference (psychology),  Great britain, race relations,  Social aspects,  Black people in literature

Places: England

Times: 16th century,  17th century,  Early modern, 1500-1700