Playing the Globe by
The relationship between English Renaissance drama and Renaissance geography is discussed in this book. It also deals with the impact on the drama of new lands and new peoples and of old lands and ancient peoples that the new geography had suddenly made visible in its new maps of the ancient world.
Other Voices, Other Views by
This collection presents early modern writers who were either virtually unknown, or whose works were overshadowed by those of their great contemporaries Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, and Donne. It is a series of historically specific readings of social relationships, understood from the point of view of marginalized or neglected sources. The intention of this volume is to amplify the canon with complementary materials whose differences of voice and view may moderate and open up new discourses on the early modern period.
Renaissance Women Writers by
This work takes as its subject the literary writings of English women working in the 80-year period from 1560 to 1640. It aims to provide both a comprehensive introduction to the range of women's writing (in print and in manuscript) in the period and an in-depth analysis of the work of several individual writers. The book opens with a sketch of the literary production in the Renaissance, and then goes on to address the ways in which women writers were able to counter these restraints and make a place for themselves in a male-dominated literary tradition.
The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance by
Scholarship on Middle English romance has done little to access the textual and bibliographical continuity of this remarkable literary tradition into the sixteenth century and its impact on Elizabethan works. And to an even greater extent Spenserian scholarship has failed to investigate thesignificant and complex debts which The Faerie Queene owes to medieval native verse romance and Malorys Le Morte Darthur. This book accordingly offers the first comprehensive study of the impact of Middle English romance on The Faerie Queene. It employs the concept of memory, in which both MiddleEnglish romance writers and Spenser show specific interest, to build a sense of the thematic, generic, and cultural complexity of the native romance tradition. The memorial character of Middle English romance resides in its intertextuality and its frequent presentation of its narrative events ashistorical and consequently the basis for a favourable sense of local or even national identity. Spensers memories of native romance involve a more troubled engagement with that tradition of providential national history as well as an endeavour to see in pre-Reformation romance a prophetic andobjective authority for Protestant belief.
The Self in Early Modern Literature by
This study is a response to a continuing debate stimulated primarily by cultural materialist and new historicist claims that the early modern self was decentered and fragmented by forces in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The current study enters this debate by rejecting claims of such radical discontinuity characterizing a "contingent" and "provisional" self incapable of unified subjectivity. The counterargument in The Self in Early Modern Literary Studies: For the Common Good is that the intersection of Protestant vocation and Christian civic humanism, in support of the common good, was a stabilizing factor in early modern construction of self that resisted historical and cultural dislocations. The theoretical issues at stake are examined in an introductory chapter, followed by chapters discussing central aspects of five major early modern writers whose works variously incorporate elements in Protestant vocation and Christian civic humanism. These five writers have been chosen both for their importance in the English literary canon and for their respective roles in early modern culture: "Spenser: Persons Serving Gloriana"; "Shakespeare's Henriad: Calling the Heir Apparent"; "'Ego Videbo': Donne and the Vocational Self"; "Jonson and the Truth of Envy"; "Milton: Self-Defense and the Drama of Blame." The study ends with a brief postscript on the Bacon family in whom the combined forces of Protestant vocation and Christian civic humanism were uniquely expressed.
Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric by
The last of the literary genres to be incorporated into print culture, verse in the English Renaissance not only was published in anthologies, pamphlets, and folio editions, it was also circulated in manuscript. In this ground-breaking historical and cultural study of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century lyric poetry, Marotti examines the interrelationship between the two systems of literary transmission and shows how in England manuscript and print publication together shaped the emerging institution of literature.
Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England by
Buildings tell stories. Castles, country homes, churches, and monasteries are "documents" of the people who built them, owned them, lived and died in them, inherited and saved or destroyed them, and recorded their histories. Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England examines the relationship between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architectural and literary works. By becoming more sensitive to the narrative functions of architecture, Anne M. Myers argues, we begin to understand how a range of writers viewed and made use of the material built environment that surrounded the production of early modern texts in England. Scholars have long found themselves in the position of excusing or explaining England’s failure to achieve the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance in the visual arts. Myers proposes that architecture inspired an unusual amount of historiographic and literary production, including poetry, drama, architectural treatises, and diaries. Works by William Camden, Henry Wotton, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Anne Clifford, and John Evelyn, when considered as a group, are texts that overturn the engrained critical notion that a Protestant fear of idolatry sentenced the visual arts and architecture in England to a state of suspicion and neglect.
Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature by
This book explores how machinery and the practice of mechanics participate in the intellectual culture of Renaissance humanism. Before the emergence of the concept of technology, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writers recognised the applicability of mechanical practices and objects to some of their most urgent moral, aesthetic, and political questions. The construction, use, and representation of devices including clocks, scientific instruments, stage machinery, and war engines not only reflect but also actively reshape how Renaissance writers define and justify artifice and instrumentality - the reliance upon instruments, mechanical or otherwise, to achieve a particular end. Harnessing the discipline of mechanics to their literary and philosophical concerns, scholars and poets including Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, George Chapman, and Gabriel Harvey look to machinery to ponder and dispute all manner of instrumental means, from rhetoric and pedagogy to diplomacy and courtly dissimulation.
The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature by
This is the first full-scale history of medieval English literature in nearly a century. Thirty-three contributors provide information on a vast range of literary texts and the conditions of their production and reception. The volume also contains a chronology, full bibliography and a detailed index. This book offers the most extensive account available of the medieval literatures so drastically reconfigured in Tudor England. It will prove essential reading for scholars of the Renaissance as well as medievalists, and for historians as well as literary specialists.