Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530-1580

Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530-1580 PDF Author: Cathy Shrank
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191514179
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Writing the Nation in Reformation England offers a major re-evaluation of English writing between 1530 and 1580. Studying authors such as Andrew Borde, John Leland, William Thomas, Thomas Smith, and Thomas Wilson, Cathy Shrank highlights the significance of these decades to the formation of English nationhood and examines the impact of the break with Rome on the development of a national language, literary style, and canon. As well as demonstrating the close relationship between literary culture and English identities, it reinvests Tudor writers with a sense of agency. As authors, counsellors, and thinkers they were active citizens participating within, and helping to shape, a national community. In the process, their works were also used to project an image of themselves as authors, playing - and fitted to play - their part in the public domain. In showing how these writers engaged with, and promoted, concepts of national identity, the book makes a significant contribution to our broader understanding of the early modern period, demonstrating that nationhood was not a later Elizabethan phenomenon, and that the Reformation had an immediate impact on English culture, before England emerged as a 'Protestant' nation.

Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530-1580

Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530-1580 PDF Author: Cathy Shrank
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191514179
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
Writing the Nation in Reformation England offers a major re-evaluation of English writing between 1530 and 1580. Studying authors such as Andrew Borde, John Leland, William Thomas, Thomas Smith, and Thomas Wilson, Cathy Shrank highlights the significance of these decades to the formation of English nationhood and examines the impact of the break with Rome on the development of a national language, literary style, and canon. As well as demonstrating the close relationship between literary culture and English identities, it reinvests Tudor writers with a sense of agency. As authors, counsellors, and thinkers they were active citizens participating within, and helping to shape, a national community. In the process, their works were also used to project an image of themselves as authors, playing - and fitted to play - their part in the public domain. In showing how these writers engaged with, and promoted, concepts of national identity, the book makes a significant contribution to our broader understanding of the early modern period, demonstrating that nationhood was not a later Elizabethan phenomenon, and that the Reformation had an immediate impact on English culture, before England emerged as a 'Protestant' nation.

Thomas Fuller

Thomas Fuller PDF Author: W. B. Patterson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192512412
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Long considered a highly distinctive English writer, Thomas Fuller (1608-1661) has not been treated as the significant historian he was. Fuller's The Church-History of Britain (1655) was the first comprehensive history of Christianity from antiquity to the upheavals of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the tumultuous events of the English civil wars. His numerous publications outside the genre of history—sermons, meditations, pamphlets on current thought and events—reflected and helped to shape public opinion during the revolutionary era in which he lived. Thomas Fuller: Discovering England's Religious Past highlights the fact that Fuller was a major contributor to the flowering of historical writing in early modern England. W. B. Patterson provides both a biography of Thomas Fuller's life and career in the midst of the most wrenching changes his country had ever experienced and a critical account of the origins, growth, and achievements of a new kind of history in England, a process to which he made a significant and original contribution. The volume begins with a substantial introduction dealing with memory, uses of the past, and the new history of England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Fuller was moved by the changes in Church and state that came during the civil wars that led to the trial and execution of King Charles I and to the Interregnum that followed. He sought to revive the memory of the English past, recalling the successes and failures of both distant and recent events. The book illuminates Fuller's focus on history as a means of understanding the present as well as the past, and on religion and its important place in English culture and society.

Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England

Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England PDF Author: Jamie H. Ferguson
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030817954
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The expressive and literary capacities of post-Reformation English were largely shaped in response to the Bible. Faith in the Language examines the convergence of biblical interpretation and English literature, from William Tyndale to John Donne, and argues that the groundwork for a newly authoritative literary tradition in early modern England is laid in the discourse of biblical hermeneutics. The period 1525-1611 witnessed a proliferation of English biblical versions, provoking a century-long debate about how and whether the Bible should be rendered in English. These public, indeed institutional accounts of biblical English changed the language: questions about the relation between Scripture and exegetical tradition that shaped post-Reformation hermeneutics bore strange fruit in secular literature that defined itself through varying forms of autonomy vis-a-vis prior tradition.

The Reformation of Romance

The Reformation of Romance PDF Author: Christina Wald
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311034338X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This study takes a fresh look at the abundant scenarios of disguise in early modern prose fiction and suggests reading them in the light of the contemporary religio-political developments. More specifically, it argues that Elizabethan narratives adopt aspects of the heated Eucharist debate during the Reformation, including officially renounced notions like transubstantiation, to negotiate culturally pressing concerns regarding identity change. Drawing on the rich field of research on the adaptation of pre-Reformation concerns in Anglican England, the book traces a cross-fertilisation between the Reformation and the literary mode of romance. The study brings together topics which are currently being strongly debated in early modern studies: the turn to religion, a renewed interest in aesthetics, and a growing engagement with prose fiction. Narratives which are discussed in detail are William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, Robert Greene’s Pandosto and Menaphon, Philip Sidney’s Old and New Arcadia, and Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynd and A Margarite of America, George Gascoigne’s Steele Glas, John Lyly’s Euphues: An Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and his England, Barnabe Riche’s Farewell, Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller.

Empire and Nation in Early English Renaissance Literature

Empire and Nation in Early English Renaissance Literature PDF Author: Stewart James Mottram
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843841827
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Sensitive readings of Renaissance texts offer new insights into the perception of imperialism in the sixteenth century.

Writing Wales, from the Renaissance to Romanticism

Writing Wales, from the Renaissance to Romanticism PDF Author: Stewart Mottram
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134788290
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Writing Wales explores representations of Wales in English and Welsh literatures written across a broad sweep of history, from the union of Wales with England in 1536 to the beginnings of its industrialization at the turn of the nineteenth century. The collection offers a timely contribution to the current devolutionary energies that are transforming the study of British literatures today, and it builds on recent work on Wales in Renaissance, eighteenth-century, and Romantic literary studies. What is unique about Writing Wales is that it cuts across these period divisions to enable readers for the first time to chart the development of literary treatments of Wales across three of the most tumultuous centuries in the history of British state-formation. Writing Wales explores how these period divisions have helped shape scholarly treatments of Wales, and it asks if we should continue to reinforce such period divisions, or else reconfigure our approach to Wales' literary past. The essays collected here reflect the full 300-year time span of the volume and explore writers canonical and non-canonical alike: George Peele, Michael Drayton, Henry Vaughan, Katherine Philips, and John Dyer here feature alongside other lesser-known authors. The collection showcases the wide variety of literary representations of Wales, and it explores relationships between the perception of Wales in literature and the realities of its role on the British political stage.

Reformation Fictions

Reformation Fictions PDF Author: Antoinina Bevan Zlatar
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191619221
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Reformation Fictions rehabilitates some twenty polemical dialogues published in Elizabethan England, for the first time giving them a literary, historicist and, to a lesser extent, theological reading. By juxtaposing these Elizabethan publications with key Lutheran and Calvinist dialogues, theological tracts, catechisms, sermons, and dramatic interludes, Antoinina Bevan Zlatar explores how individual dialogists exploit the fictionality of their chosen genre. Writers like John Véron, Anthony Gilby, George Gifford, John Nicholls, Job Throckmorton, and Arthur Dent, to name the most prolific, not only understood the dialogue's didactic advantages over other genres, they also valued it as a strategic defence against the censor. They were convinced, as Erasmus had been before them, that a cast of lively characters presented antithetically, often with a liberal dose of Lucianic humour, worked wonders with carnal readers. Here was an exemplary way to make doctrine entertaining and memorable, here was the honey to make the medicine go down. They knew too that these dialogues, particularly their use of manifestly imaginary interlocutors and a plot of conversion, licensed the delivery of singularly radical messages. What comes to light is a body of literature, often scurrilous, always serious, that gives us access to early modern concepts of fiction, rhetoric, and satire. It showcases the imagery of Protestant polemic against Catholicism, and puritan invective against the established Elizabethan Church, all the while triggering the frisson that comes from the illusion of eavesdropping on early modern conversations.

Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century

Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Jeff Strabone
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319952552
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
This book offers a radical new theory of the role of poetry in the rise of cultural nationalism. With equal attention to England, Scotland, and Wales, the book takes an Archipelagic approach to the study of poetics, print media, and medievalism in the rise of British Romanticism. It tells the story of how poets and antiquarian editors in the British nations rediscovered forgotten archaic poetic texts and repurposed them as the foundation of a new concept of the nation, now imagined as a primarily cultural formation. It also draws on legal and ecclesiastical history in drawing a sharp contrast between early modern and Romantic antiquarianisms. Equally a work of literary criticism and history, the book offers provocative new theorizations of nationalism and Romanticism and new readings of major British poets, including Allan Ramsay, Thomas Gray, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Unperfect Histories

Unperfect Histories PDF Author: Harriet Archer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192528858
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
The Mirror for Magistrates, the collection of de casibus complaint poems in the voices of medieval rulers and rebels compiled by William Baldwin in the 1550s, was central to the development of imaginative literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Additions by John Higgins, Thomas Blenerhasset, and Richard Niccols between 1574 and 1610 extended the Mirror's scope, shifted its focus, and prolonged its popularity; in particular, the texts' later manifestations profoundly influenced the work of Spenser and Shakespeare. Unperfect Histories is the first monograph to consider the text's early modern transmission history as a whole. In chapters on Baldwin, Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols's complaint collections, it demonstrates that the Mirror is an invaluable witness to how verse history was conceptualized, written, and read across the period, and explores the ways in which it was repeatedly reinterpreted and redeployed in response to changing contemporary concerns. The Mirror corpus encompasses topical allegory, nationalist polemic, and historiographical skepticism, as well as the macabre humour and metatextual play which have come to be known as hallmarks of Baldwin's mid-Tudor writings. What has not been recognised is the complex interaction of these themes and techniques right across the Mirror's history. Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols's contributions are analysed for the first time here, both within their own literary and historiographical contexts, and in dialogue with Baldwin's early editions. This new reading offers a lively account of the texts' depth and variety, and provides insight into the extent of the Mirror's influence and ubiquity in early modern literary culture.

Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England

Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England PDF Author: Harriet Lyon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316516407
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Explores the seismic impact of the dissolution of the monasteries, offering a new perspective on the English Reformation.