Defending Literature in Early Modern England

Defending Literature in Early Modern England PDF Author: Robert Matz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139426567
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Why was literature so often defended and defined in early modern England in terms of its ability to provide the Horatian ideal of both profit and pleasure? This book, first published in 2000, analyses Renaissance literary theory in the context of social transformations of the period, focusing on conflicting ideas about gentility that emerged as the English aristocracy evolved from a feudal warrior class to a civil elite. Through close readings centered on works by Thomas Elyot, Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Matz argues that literature attempted to mediate a complex set of contradictory social expectations. His original study engages with important theoretical work such as Pierre Bourdieu's and offers a substantial critique of New Historicist theory. It challenges recent accounts of the power of Renaissance authorship, emphasizing the uncertain status of literature during this time of cultural change, and sheds light on why and how canonical works became canonical.

Defending Literature in Early Modern England

Defending Literature in Early Modern England PDF Author: Robert Matz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139426567
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why was literature so often defended and defined in early modern England in terms of its ability to provide the Horatian ideal of both profit and pleasure? This book, first published in 2000, analyses Renaissance literary theory in the context of social transformations of the period, focusing on conflicting ideas about gentility that emerged as the English aristocracy evolved from a feudal warrior class to a civil elite. Through close readings centered on works by Thomas Elyot, Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Matz argues that literature attempted to mediate a complex set of contradictory social expectations. His original study engages with important theoretical work such as Pierre Bourdieu's and offers a substantial critique of New Historicist theory. It challenges recent accounts of the power of Renaissance authorship, emphasizing the uncertain status of literature during this time of cultural change, and sheds light on why and how canonical works became canonical.

The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England

The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England PDF Author: Associate Professor of English Michael Ullyot
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192849336
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
In this study, Michael Ullyot makes two new arguments about the rhetoric of exemplarity in late Elizabethan and Jacobean culture: first, that exemplarity is a recursive cycle driven by rhetoricians' words and readers' actions; and second, that positive moral examples are not replicable, but rather aspirational models of readers' posthumous biographies. For example, Alexander the Great envied Achilles less for his exemplary life than for Homer's account of it. Ullyot defines the three types of decorum on which exemplary rhetoric and imitation rely, and charts their operations through Philip Sidney's poetics, Edmund Spenser's poetry, and the dedications, sermons, elegies, biographies, and other occasional texts about Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, and Henry, Prince of Wales. Ullyot expands the definition of occasional texts to include those that criticize their circumstances to demand better ones, and historicizes moral exemplarity in the contexts of sixteenth-century Protestant memory and humanist pedagogy. The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England concludes that all exemplary subjects suffer from the problem of metonymy, the objection that their chosen excerpts misrepresent their missing parts. This problem also besets historicist literary criticism, ever subject to corrections from the archive, so this study concedes that its own rhetorical methods are exemplary.

Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture

Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture PDF Author: David Loewenstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107320348
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary volume of essays brings together a team of leading early modern historians and literary scholars in order to examine the changing conceptions, character, and condemnation of 'heresy' in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Definitions of 'heresy' and 'heretics' were the subject of heated controversies in England from the English Reformation to the end of the seventeenth century. These essays illuminate the significant literary issues involved in both defending and demonising heretical beliefs, including the contested hermeneutic strategies applied to the interpretation of the Bible, and they examine how debates over heresy stimulated the increasing articulation of arguments for religious toleration in England. Offering fresh perspectives on John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and others, this volume should be of interest to all literary, religious and political historians working on early modern English culture.

Reading Sensations in Early Modern England

Reading Sensations in Early Modern England PDF Author: K. Craik
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230206085
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
How did Renaissance literature affect readers' minds, bodies and souls? In what ways did the history of literary experience overlap with the history of humours and emotions? This book argues that a new aesthetic vocabulary based on the theory of the passions was formulated in the Renaissance to describe the affective power of literature.

The Brand of Print

The Brand of Print PDF Author: Andie Silva
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004410244
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The Brand of Print offers a comprehensive analysis of the ways printers, publishers, stationers, and booksellers designed paratexts to market printed books as cultural commodities. This study traces envoys to the reader, visual design in title pages and tables of contents, and patron dedications, illustrating how the agents of print branded their markets by crafting relationships with readers and articulating the value of their labor in an increasingly competitive trade. Applying terms from contemporary marketing theory to the study of early modern paratexts, Andie Silva encourages a consideration of how print agents' labor and agency, made visible through paratextual design, continues to influence how we read, study, and digitize early modern texts.

Humanism and Good Books in Sixteenth-Century England

Humanism and Good Books in Sixteenth-Century England PDF Author: Katherine C. Little
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192883216
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This book explores sixteenth-century humanism as an origin for the idea of literature as good, even great, books. It argues that humanists located the value of books not only in the goodness of their writing-their eloquence—but also in their capacity to shape readers in good and bad behavior, thoughts, and feelings, in other words, in their morality. To approach humanism in this way, by attending to its moral interests, is to provide a new perspective on periodization, the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance / early modern. That is, humanists did not so much rupture with medieval ideas about literature or with medieval models as they adapted and altered them, offering a new confidence about an old idea: the moral instructiveness of pagan, classical texts for Christian readers. This revaluation of literature was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, humanist confidence inspired authors to invent their own good books—good in style and morals—in morality plays such as Everyman and the Christian Terence tradition and in educational treatises such as Sir Thomas Elyot's Boke of the Governour. On the other hand, humanism placed a new burden on authors, requiring their work to teach and delight. In the wake of humanism, authors struggled to articulate the value of their work for readers, returning to a pre-humanist path that they associated with Geoffrey Chaucer. This medieval-inflected doubt pervades the late sixteenth-century writings of the most prolific and influential Elizabethans-Robert Greene, George Gascoigne, and Edmund Spenser.

Shakespeare and Republicanism

Shakespeare and Republicanism PDF Author: Andrew Hadfield
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521816076
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
This highly praised book, first published in 2005, reveals how political thought critical of the government underpins Shakespeare's writing.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English

The Oxford History of Poetry in English PDF Author: Catherine Bates
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192678876
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 775

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Book Description
The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesises existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the volumes. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry features a history of the birth moment of modern 'English' poetry in greater detail than previous studies. It examines the literary transitions, institutional contexts, artistic practices, and literary genres within which poets compose their works. Each chapter combines an orientation to its topic and a contribution to the field. Specifically, the volume introduces a narrative about the advent of modern English poetry from Skelton to Spenser, attending to the events that underwrite the poets' achievements: Humanism; Reformation; monarchism and republicanism; colonization; print and manuscript; theatre; science; and companionate marriage. Featured are metre and form, figuration and allusiveness, and literary career, as well as a wide range of poets, from Wyatt, Surrey, and Isabella Whitney to Ralegh, Drayton, and Mary Herbert. Major works discussed include Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and Shakespeare's Sonnets.

An Apology For Poetry (Or The Defence Of Poesy)

An Apology For Poetry (Or The Defence Of Poesy) PDF Author: Philip Sidney
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719053764
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
An Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesy), by the celebrated soldier-poet Sir Philip Sidney, is the most important work of literary theory published in the Renaissance. Its wit and inventiveness place it among the first great literary productions of the age of Shakespeare. Since 1965 Geoffrey Shepherd's edition of the Apology has been the standard, and this revision of Shepherd's edition, with a new introduction and extensive notes, is designed to introduce Sidney's best-known work to a new generation of readers at the beginning of thetwenty-first century.Unfamiliar words and phrases are glossed, classical and other references explained, and difficult passages analysed in detail. This greatly expanded edition will be of value to all those interested in the Renaissance, from students and teachers at school and university to the inquisitive general reader.

A Companion to Renaissance Poetry

A Companion to Renaissance Poetry PDF Author: Catherine Bates
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118585127
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 677

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Book Description
The most comprehensive collection of essays on Renaissance poetry on the market Covering the period 1520–1680, A Companion to Renaissance Poetry offers 46 essays which present an in-depth account of the context, production, and interpretation of early modern British poetry. It provides students with a deep appreciation for, and sensitivity toward, the ways in which poets of the period understood and fashioned a distinctly vernacular voice, while engaging them with some of the debates and departures that are currently animating the discipline. A Companion to Renaissance Poetry analyzes the historical, cultural, political, and religious background of the time, addressing issues such as education, translation, the Reformation, theorizations of poetry, and more. The book immerses readers in non-dramatic poetry from Wyatt to Milton, focusing on the key poetic genres—epic, lyric, complaint, elegy, epistle, pastoral, satire, and religious poetry. It also offers an inclusive account of the poetic production of the period by canonical and less canonical writers, female and male. Finally, it offers examples of current developments in the interpretation of Renaissance poetry, including economic, ecological, scientific, materialist, and formalist approaches. • Covers a wide selection of authors and texts • Features contributions from notable authors, scholars, and critics across the globe • Offers a substantial section on recent and developing approaches to reading Renaissance poetry A Companion to Renaissance Poetry is an ideal resource for all students and scholars of the literature and culture of the Renaissance period.