This collection of essays addresses the concept of 'disaster' through a variety of literary texts dating back to the early modern period.
Sophie Chiari is a tenured professor of early modern English Literature at Université Clermont Auvergne. She holds a doctoral degree from Université Paul Valéry - Montpellier 3, France, and she received her accreditation to supervise research from Université Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle. Among her recently published collections of essays are Freedom and Censorship in Early Modern English Literature (2018) and Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare, co-edited with John Mucciolo (2019). Her monograph Shakespeare's Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment, was published in 2019 and her latest book, entitled Shakespeare and the Environment: A Dictionary, was published in early 2022.
General Introduction
Sophie Chiari
PART I. Extreme Conditions
Chapter 1
'Shakespeare, Natural Disaster, and Atmospheric Phenomena'
Geraldo U. de Sousa
Chapter 2
'Frozen: English Journeys to the End of the World'
Sophie Lemercier-Goddard
Chapter 3
'Musical Representations of Natural Phenomena in Early Modern English Madrigals'
Chantal Schütz
PART II. Tempestuous Skies
Chapter 4
'Man in Stormy Weathers in the Age of Shakespeare'
Danièle Berton-Charrière
Chapter 5
'The Storms of Othello in 1613'
David M. Bergeron
Chapter 6
'Francis Bacon and the Mastery of the Winds'
Angus Vine
PART III. Biblical Calamities
Chapter 7
'The Plague of Gnats in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries'
Sophie Chiari
Chapter 8
'Michael Drayton and the Invention of the Disaster Epic: Eco-catastrophe in the Late Poems'
Todd A. Borlik
Chapter 9
'John Ray's Inquiry into the Future Dissolution of the World in The Miscellaneous Discourses'
Mickaël Popelard
Coda
'Climate Change and the Postsecular in Paul Schrader's First Reformed'
John Gillies