Wax Impressions, Figures, and Forms in Early Modern Literature, 1st ed. 2019 Wax Works Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700 Series

This book explores the role of wax as an important conceptual material used to work out the nature and limits of the early modern human. By surveying the use of wax in early modern cultural spaces such as the stage and the artist?s studio and in literary and philosophical texts, including those by William Shakespeare, John Donne, René Descartes, Margaret Cavendish, and Edmund Spenser, this book shows that wax is a flexible material employed to define, explore, and problematize a wide variety of early modern relations including the relationship of man and God, man and woman, mind and the world, and man and machine. 

1. Introduction: Wax Concepts.- 2. Wax Seals: Gendered Relations in Shakespeare.- 3. Wax Minds: Writing Subjectivity and Agency in Hamlet and The Atheist’s Tragedy.- 4. Wax Patterning: Cavendish and the Physics of Wax.- 5. Wax Arts: Projects of Transformation in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Donne’s Sappho to Philaenis.- 6.Wax Hybrids: Re-thinking Subjects and Objects in Ovid, Paré, Descartes, and Spenser.- 7. Epilogue: A Figure of Wax.

Lynn M. Maxwell is Assistant Professor of English at Spelman College, USA, where she teaches courses in early modern literature and Shakespeare. Her work has been previously published in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts and The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies.