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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 |
ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS: Tuesday,
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Lowell
Prize: Peter Stallybrass
