Violence and Grace

In Violence and Grace, Nichole Miller establishes a conceptual link between early modern English drama and twentieth-century political theology, both of which emerge from the experience of political crisis. Even as philosophers from Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Walter Benjamin to Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil drew upon sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dramatic representations of the nation-state to analyze the political phenomena of late modernity, Miller contends that they effaced the gendered and sexual dimensions of power and “exceptional life” so crucial to these plays. Miller’s analyses accordingly undertake to retrieve for political theology the relations between gender, sexuality, and the political aesthetics of violence on the early modern stage, addressing the plays of Marlowe, Middleton, and especially Shakespeare. In doing so, she compellingly expands our understanding of drama’s continuing theoretical impact.

While Miller constantly engages major ideas and texts, she shows perhaps her greatest talent as a close reader, not only of the early modern texts but of their sources and the more contemporary theory she uses to illuminate them . . .The result is a closely reasoned and closely argued contribution to today’s early modern studies that also understands its roots in a precarious present."" - Modern Philology

Nichole E. Miller is an assistant professor of English at Temple University.