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- Title
Cute Coriolanus.
- Authors
ANDERSON, THOMAS
- Abstract
The descriptive "cute Coriolanus" is historically without precedent, a linguistic extravagancy, an epithet and its object, forcefully incongruent yet alliteratively and even coyly connected. In Coriolanus, a decidedly un-cute play, Shakespeare glimpses two worlds elsewhere: the first is the world that Coriolanus inhabits after leaving Rome--a world of military vengeance and betrayal born from his alliance with his enemy Aufidius. The second is the world of mothers and sons, sewing and gilded butterflies. This other world is the place of small, delicate, sweet, cute things, precious objects that enchant. This essay argues that in Coriolanus, the layering of bodies, one tender and cute, suckling milk, the other hard and wounded, spitting blood, are remnants of the holy eucharist. Challenging contemporary narratives that tout secularization as the primary condition of modernity, this essay makes the case that cute Coriolanus, the tenderbodied man-child and the "only son of [Volumnia's] womb" (1.3.6), is an embodiment of ambivalent secularism--the sense that even in the play's most exhilarating attempts to separate from a cute theology, cute-ness persists as a remnant of early modernity's post-secularism.
- Subjects
CORIOLANUS (Play : Shakespeare); SHAKESPEARE, William, 1564-1616; CORIOLANUS, Cnaeus Marcius; CUTENESS (Aesthetics); SECULARISM; EARLY Modern Period (Literary period)
- Publication
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2016, Vol 16, Issue 3, p46
- ISSN
1531-0485
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.1353/jem.2016.0020