Building an English (Early Modern) Identity: "Race" and Capitalism in Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West, or, A Girl Worth Gold
ISSN: 0211-5913
Year of publication: 2007
Issue: 54
Pages: 55-68
Type: Article
More publications in: Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses
Abstract
In the early modern period England develops a process of construction of national identity based on “racial” and religious differences and the adoption of capitalism. This epistemological and material transition can be perceived in much of the drama of the period, which, like Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, functions as much within this process as in response to it. All these changes, and the resistances to it, can be best analyzed through the semiotic notion of Juri Lotman’s semiosphere