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Lowell
Prize: Peter Stallybrass
The
James Russell Lowell Prize, presented for the most outstanding literary
or linguistic study by a member of the Modern Language Association,
has been awarded to Professor Peter Stallybrass (English and Comparative
Literature, SAS) and to Ann Rosalind Jones (Comparative Literature,
Smith College) for Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of
Modern Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2000). This
is the second time in four years in which a member of Penn's English
and Comparative Literature has won this award. The other award winner
(1997) was Dr. David Wallace, Judith Rodin Professor of English
for Chaucerian Polity (Stanford University Press 1997). "
That means that Penn English has won this top honor twice in four
years; and in fact, it means that the medieval/Renaissance group
within English has confirmed its status as the best such group in
the USA," said Dr. Wallace.
The
Modern Language Association noted in their review of the book:
In their beautifully conceived, well-made, and copiously illustrated
book, Jones and Stallybrass think out what it might mean to put
on clothes in Renaissance society, on English stages, and for
portraiture. Changes of clothes, associated with superficial whims
of fashion, also effect and express deeper shifts of identity.
Renaissance clothes, for Jones and Stallybrass, are animated:
they mould and shape their wearers; they burden them with memories
of affiliation (as with liveries) or ancestry (as with inherited
garments.... In all such discussions, Jones and Stallybrass work--through
detailed, well-documented historical argument--to differentiate
the social functioning and psychic force of clothing in the Renaissance
from our own assumptions about how clothes work. Above all, perhaps,
they argue against our own current propensity to see subjects
as prior to objects, wearers to what is worn. And in doing this,
they have written a brilliant, multidisciplinary, and thoroughly
original book that is a pleasure to read.
Professor Stallybrass and Professor Jones will receive the award
at the MLA's 117th annual convention held in New Orleans in
December.
Almanac, Vol. 48, No. 8, October 16, 2001
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ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS:
Tuesday,
October 16, 2001
Volume 48 Number8
www.upenn.edu/almanac/
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