Conceiving Desire: Metaphor, Cognition and Eros in Lyly and Shakespeare

Gillian Knoll's book explores the role of the mind in creating erotic experience on the early modern stage, advancing a new critical methodology that credits the role of cognition in the experience of erotic desire and pleasure. It illuminates the dramatic vitality of philosophical and contemplative erotic speech and provides the first full-length study that pairs John Lyly's and William Shakespeare's drama, uncovering new forms of intimacy in their plays.

Format: Hardback
Length: 192 pages
Publication date: 31 March 2020
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

The mind plays a crucial role in creating erotic experiences on the early modern stage, according to Gillian Knoll's new critical methodology. She advances a new critical methodology that credits the role of cognition in the experience of erotic desire and pleasure itself. Knoll explores the philosophical underpinnings of erotic metaphors, drawing from ancient, early modern, and contemporary thinkers such as Aristotle, Giordano Bruno, Gaston Bachelard, Emmanuel Levinas, Kenneth Burke, George Lakoff, and Mark Turner. She illuminates the dramatic vitality of philosophical and contemplative erotic speech and provides the first full-length study that pairs John Lyly's and William Shakespeare's drama, uncovering new forms of intimacy in their plays. To conceive desire is to acknowledge the generative potential of the erotic imagination, its capacity to impart form and make meaning out of the most elusive experiences. Drawing from cognitive theories about the metaphorical nature of thought, Knoll traces the contours of three conceptual metaphors - motion, space, and creativity - that shape desire in plays by John Lyly and William Shakespeare. Metaphors, she argues, do more than narrate or express eros; they constitute erotic experience for Lyly's and Shakespeare's characters.

Weight: 586g
Dimension: 241 x 422 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474428521