Author: Claude J. Summers
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826264050
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
Although the literary circle is widely recognized as a significant feature of Renaissance literary culture, it has received remarkably little examination. In this collection of essays, the authors attempt to explain literary circles and cultural communities in Renaissance England by exploring both actual and imaginary ways in which they were conceived and the various needs they fulfilled. The book also pays considerable attention to larger theoretical issues relating to literary circles. The essayists raise important questions about the extent to which literary circles were actual constructs or fictional creations. Whether illuminating or limiting, the circle metaphor itself can be extended or reformulated. Some of the authors discuss how particular circles actually operated, and some question the very concept of the literary circle. Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England will be an important addition to seventeenth-century studies.
Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England
Author: Claude J. Summers
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826264050
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
Although the literary circle is widely recognized as a significant feature of Renaissance literary culture, it has received remarkably little examination. In this collection of essays, the authors attempt to explain literary circles and cultural communities in Renaissance England by exploring both actual and imaginary ways in which they were conceived and the various needs they fulfilled. The book also pays considerable attention to larger theoretical issues relating to literary circles. The essayists raise important questions about the extent to which literary circles were actual constructs or fictional creations. Whether illuminating or limiting, the circle metaphor itself can be extended or reformulated. Some of the authors discuss how particular circles actually operated, and some question the very concept of the literary circle. Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England will be an important addition to seventeenth-century studies.
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826264050
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
Although the literary circle is widely recognized as a significant feature of Renaissance literary culture, it has received remarkably little examination. In this collection of essays, the authors attempt to explain literary circles and cultural communities in Renaissance England by exploring both actual and imaginary ways in which they were conceived and the various needs they fulfilled. The book also pays considerable attention to larger theoretical issues relating to literary circles. The essayists raise important questions about the extent to which literary circles were actual constructs or fictional creations. Whether illuminating or limiting, the circle metaphor itself can be extended or reformulated. Some of the authors discuss how particular circles actually operated, and some question the very concept of the literary circle. Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England will be an important addition to seventeenth-century studies.
Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe
Author: Julie Campbell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135115382X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372
Book Description
A comparative analysis, this study examines the interactions of early modern male and female writers within the context of literary circles. In particular, Campbell examines how the querelle des femmes as a discursive rhetorical tradition of praise and blame influenced perceptions of well-educated women who were part of literary circles in Italy, France, and England from approximately 1530 to 1650. To gain a better sense of how querelle language and issues were used for or against learned women writers, Campbell aligns selected works by female and male writers, pairing them to analyze how the woman writer responds, deflects, or rewrites the male writer's ideological script on women. She focuses first on the courtesan Tullia d'Aragona's response in her Dialogo della infinità di amore to Sperone Speroni's Dialogo di amore, and contrasts the actress/writer Isabella Andreini's pastoral La Mirtilla with Torquato Tasso's Aminta. She then discusses the influence of Italian actresses upon the manners and mores of French women of the Valois court, especially focusing on performative aspects of French women's participation in court and salon rituals. To that end, she examines the influential salon of the aristocratic, learned Claude-Catherine de Clermont, duchesse de Retz, who encouraged the writing of positive querelle rhetoric in the form of Petrarchan, Neoplatonic encomiastic poetry to buttress her reputation and that of her female friends. Next, Campbell reads Louise Lab D‘t de Folie et d'Amour against Pontus de Tyard's Solitaire premier to illustrate the tensions between a traditional and nontraditional querelle stance. She then discusses Continental influence upon English writers in the context of the Sidney circle in England. Moving to the closet dramas of the Sidney circle, Campbell examines the solidarity these writers demonstrated with nontraditional stances on querelle issues, and, finally, she explores how three generations of English literary circles con
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135115382X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372
Book Description
A comparative analysis, this study examines the interactions of early modern male and female writers within the context of literary circles. In particular, Campbell examines how the querelle des femmes as a discursive rhetorical tradition of praise and blame influenced perceptions of well-educated women who were part of literary circles in Italy, France, and England from approximately 1530 to 1650. To gain a better sense of how querelle language and issues were used for or against learned women writers, Campbell aligns selected works by female and male writers, pairing them to analyze how the woman writer responds, deflects, or rewrites the male writer's ideological script on women. She focuses first on the courtesan Tullia d'Aragona's response in her Dialogo della infinità di amore to Sperone Speroni's Dialogo di amore, and contrasts the actress/writer Isabella Andreini's pastoral La Mirtilla with Torquato Tasso's Aminta. She then discusses the influence of Italian actresses upon the manners and mores of French women of the Valois court, especially focusing on performative aspects of French women's participation in court and salon rituals. To that end, she examines the influential salon of the aristocratic, learned Claude-Catherine de Clermont, duchesse de Retz, who encouraged the writing of positive querelle rhetoric in the form of Petrarchan, Neoplatonic encomiastic poetry to buttress her reputation and that of her female friends. Next, Campbell reads Louise Lab D‘t de Folie et d'Amour against Pontus de Tyard's Solitaire premier to illustrate the tensions between a traditional and nontraditional querelle stance. She then discusses Continental influence upon English writers in the context of the Sidney circle in England. Moving to the closet dramas of the Sidney circle, Campbell examines the solidarity these writers demonstrated with nontraditional stances on querelle issues, and, finally, she explores how three generations of English literary circles con
Mediatrix
Author: Julie Crawford
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191021083
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England considers the roles women played as literary patrons, dedicatees, readers, and writers in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, and the intimate relationship between these literary activities and what has often been called 'politically active' humanism. Focusing on the interrelated communities centered on Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Lady Margaret Hoby; Lucy Harrington Russell, the Countess of Bedford; and Lady Mary Wroth, Mediatrix argues that women played integral roles not only in the production of some of the most renowned literary texts in the period, including Philip Sidney's Arcadia, John Donne's poetry, and Mary Wroth's Urania, but also in wider networks of intellectual, religious and political activism. Each of the communities discussed was concerned with the cause loosely identified as international or militant Protestantism and frequently mediated through the circulation of texts of all kinds. Illuminating women's constitutive involvement in everything from the genres of the texts produced — romances, verse letters, texts of religious controversy — to the places in which those texts were produced and circulated - -the estates of Wilton, Penshurst, Hackness, Twickenham, and Loughton — and the conditions and hermeneutics by which they were read, Mediatrix offers an account of early modern English literary production with women at the center and political activism as one of its primary, rather than merely topical, concerns.
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191021083
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England considers the roles women played as literary patrons, dedicatees, readers, and writers in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, and the intimate relationship between these literary activities and what has often been called 'politically active' humanism. Focusing on the interrelated communities centered on Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Lady Margaret Hoby; Lucy Harrington Russell, the Countess of Bedford; and Lady Mary Wroth, Mediatrix argues that women played integral roles not only in the production of some of the most renowned literary texts in the period, including Philip Sidney's Arcadia, John Donne's poetry, and Mary Wroth's Urania, but also in wider networks of intellectual, religious and political activism. Each of the communities discussed was concerned with the cause loosely identified as international or militant Protestantism and frequently mediated through the circulation of texts of all kinds. Illuminating women's constitutive involvement in everything from the genres of the texts produced — romances, verse letters, texts of religious controversy — to the places in which those texts were produced and circulated - -the estates of Wilton, Penshurst, Hackness, Twickenham, and Loughton — and the conditions and hermeneutics by which they were read, Mediatrix offers an account of early modern English literary production with women at the center and political activism as one of its primary, rather than merely topical, concerns.
Ben Jonson
Author: Ian Donaldson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191636797
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 554
Book Description
Ben Jonson was the greatest of Shakespeare's contemporaries. In the century following his death he was seen by many as the finest of all English writers, living or dead. His fame rested not only on the numerous plays he had written for the theatre, but on his achievements over three decades as principal masque-writer to the early Stuart court, where he had worked in creative, and often stormy, collaboration with Inigo Jones. One of the most accomplished poets of the age, he had become - in fact if not in title - the first Poet Laureate in England. Jonson's life was full of drama. Serving in the Low Countries as a young man, he overcame a Spanish adversary in single combat in full view of both the armies. His early satirical play, The Isle of Dogs, landed him in prison, and brought all theatrical activity in London to a temporary — and very nearly to a permanent — standstill. He was 'almost at the gallows' for killing a fellow actor after a quarrel, and converted to Catholicism while awaiting execution. He supped with the Gunpowder conspirators on the eve of their planned coup at Westminster. After satirizing the Scots in Eastward Ho! he was imprisoned again; and throughout his career was repeatedly interrogated about plays and poems thought to contain seditious or slanderous material. In his middle years, twenty stone in weight, he walked to Scotland and back, seemingly partly to fulfil a wager, and partly to see the land of his forebears. He travelled in Europe as tutor to the mischievous son of Sir Walter Ralegh, who 'caused him to be drunken and dead drunk' and wheeled provocatively through the streets of Paris. During his later years he presided over a sociable club in the Apollo Room in Fleet Street, mixed with the most learned scholars of his day, and viewed with keen interest the political, religious, and scientific controversies of the day. Ian Donaldson's new biography draws on freshly discovered writings by and about Ben Jonson, and locates his work within the social and intellectual contexts of his time. Jonson emerges from this study as a more complex and volatile character than his own self-declarations (and much modern scholarship) would allow, and as a writer whose work strikingly foresees - and at times pre-emptively satirizes - the modern age.
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191636797
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 554
Book Description
Ben Jonson was the greatest of Shakespeare's contemporaries. In the century following his death he was seen by many as the finest of all English writers, living or dead. His fame rested not only on the numerous plays he had written for the theatre, but on his achievements over three decades as principal masque-writer to the early Stuart court, where he had worked in creative, and often stormy, collaboration with Inigo Jones. One of the most accomplished poets of the age, he had become - in fact if not in title - the first Poet Laureate in England. Jonson's life was full of drama. Serving in the Low Countries as a young man, he overcame a Spanish adversary in single combat in full view of both the armies. His early satirical play, The Isle of Dogs, landed him in prison, and brought all theatrical activity in London to a temporary — and very nearly to a permanent — standstill. He was 'almost at the gallows' for killing a fellow actor after a quarrel, and converted to Catholicism while awaiting execution. He supped with the Gunpowder conspirators on the eve of their planned coup at Westminster. After satirizing the Scots in Eastward Ho! he was imprisoned again; and throughout his career was repeatedly interrogated about plays and poems thought to contain seditious or slanderous material. In his middle years, twenty stone in weight, he walked to Scotland and back, seemingly partly to fulfil a wager, and partly to see the land of his forebears. He travelled in Europe as tutor to the mischievous son of Sir Walter Ralegh, who 'caused him to be drunken and dead drunk' and wheeled provocatively through the streets of Paris. During his later years he presided over a sociable club in the Apollo Room in Fleet Street, mixed with the most learned scholars of his day, and viewed with keen interest the political, religious, and scientific controversies of the day. Ian Donaldson's new biography draws on freshly discovered writings by and about Ben Jonson, and locates his work within the social and intellectual contexts of his time. Jonson emerges from this study as a more complex and volatile character than his own self-declarations (and much modern scholarship) would allow, and as a writer whose work strikingly foresees - and at times pre-emptively satirizes - the modern age.
The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell
Author: Derek Hirst
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521884179
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 245
Book Description
A set of specially commissioned essays forming a fresh understanding of the poet within his time and place.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521884179
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 245
Book Description
A set of specially commissioned essays forming a fresh understanding of the poet within his time and place.
Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars
Author: Nicholas McDowell
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191608505
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 306
Book Description
This book is about the things which could unite, rather than divide, poets during the English Civil Wars: friendship, patronage relations, literary admiration, and anti-clericalism. The central figure is Andrew Marvell, renowned for his 'ambivalent' allegiance in the late 1640s. Little is known about Marvell's associations in this period, when many of his best-known lyrics were composed. The London literary circle which formed in 1647 under the patronage of the wealthy royalist Thomas Stanley included 'Cavalier' friends of Marvell such as Richard Lovelace but also John Hall, a Parliamentarian propagandist inspired by reading Milton. Marvell is placed in the context of Stanley's impressive circle of friends and their efforts to develop English lyric capability in the absence of traditional court patronage. By recovering the cultural values that were shared by Marvell and the like-minded men with whom he moved in the literary circles of post-war London, we are more likely to find the reasons for their decisions about political allegiance. By focusing on a circle of friends and associates we can also get a sense of how they communicated with and influenced one another through their verse. There are innovative readings of Milton's sonnets and Lovelace's lyric verse, while new light is shed on the origins and audience not only of Marvell's early political poems, including the 'Horatian Ode', but lyrics such as 'To His Coy Mistress'.
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191608505
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 306
Book Description
This book is about the things which could unite, rather than divide, poets during the English Civil Wars: friendship, patronage relations, literary admiration, and anti-clericalism. The central figure is Andrew Marvell, renowned for his 'ambivalent' allegiance in the late 1640s. Little is known about Marvell's associations in this period, when many of his best-known lyrics were composed. The London literary circle which formed in 1647 under the patronage of the wealthy royalist Thomas Stanley included 'Cavalier' friends of Marvell such as Richard Lovelace but also John Hall, a Parliamentarian propagandist inspired by reading Milton. Marvell is placed in the context of Stanley's impressive circle of friends and their efforts to develop English lyric capability in the absence of traditional court patronage. By recovering the cultural values that were shared by Marvell and the like-minded men with whom he moved in the literary circles of post-war London, we are more likely to find the reasons for their decisions about political allegiance. By focusing on a circle of friends and associates we can also get a sense of how they communicated with and influenced one another through their verse. There are innovative readings of Milton's sonnets and Lovelace's lyric verse, while new light is shed on the origins and audience not only of Marvell's early political poems, including the 'Horatian Ode', but lyrics such as 'To His Coy Mistress'.
Secularisation and the Leiden Circle
Author: Mark Somos
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004209573
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 558
Book Description
This book shows how a group of early-seventeenth-century writers excluded theologically grounded argument from a wide range of disciplines, from the natural sciences to international relations. Somos uses richly contextualised portraits of Scaliger, Heinsius, Cunaeus and Grotius to develop a new model of secularisation as a contingent, cumulative, and incomplete process, with some unintended consequences. Facing severe conflict, the Leiden Circle realised that rival claims that staked their truth-content and validity on religious belief were ultimately irreconcilable. Gradually they removed such claims from acceptable discourse, contributing to the comprehensive secularisation that defines modernity. If blindness to religious claims has become definitive of modern politics, Somos concludes, recollecting its historical complexity and contingency is essential for overcoming some of its failures.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004209573
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 558
Book Description
This book shows how a group of early-seventeenth-century writers excluded theologically grounded argument from a wide range of disciplines, from the natural sciences to international relations. Somos uses richly contextualised portraits of Scaliger, Heinsius, Cunaeus and Grotius to develop a new model of secularisation as a contingent, cumulative, and incomplete process, with some unintended consequences. Facing severe conflict, the Leiden Circle realised that rival claims that staked their truth-content and validity on religious belief were ultimately irreconcilable. Gradually they removed such claims from acceptable discourse, contributing to the comprehensive secularisation that defines modernity. If blindness to religious claims has become definitive of modern politics, Somos concludes, recollecting its historical complexity and contingency is essential for overcoming some of its failures.
Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
Author: Margaret P. Hannay
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351964992
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, was renowned in her own time for her metrical translation of biblical Psalms, several original poems, translations from French and Italian, and her literary patronage. William Shakespeare used her Antonius as a source, Edmund Spenser celebrated her original poems, John Donne praised her Psalmes, and Lady Mary Wroth and Aemilia Lanyer depicted her as an exemplary poet. Arguably the first Englishwoman to be celebrated as a literary figure, she has also attracted considerable modern attention, including more than two hundred critical studies. This volume offers a brief introduction to her life and an extensive overview of the critical reception of her works, reprints some of the most essential and least accessible essays about her life and writings, and includes a full bibliography.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351964992
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, was renowned in her own time for her metrical translation of biblical Psalms, several original poems, translations from French and Italian, and her literary patronage. William Shakespeare used her Antonius as a source, Edmund Spenser celebrated her original poems, John Donne praised her Psalmes, and Lady Mary Wroth and Aemilia Lanyer depicted her as an exemplary poet. Arguably the first Englishwoman to be celebrated as a literary figure, she has also attracted considerable modern attention, including more than two hundred critical studies. This volume offers a brief introduction to her life and an extensive overview of the critical reception of her works, reprints some of the most essential and least accessible essays about her life and writings, and includes a full bibliography.
Texts from the Querelle, 1521–1615
Author: Pamela J. Benson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351895540
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 446
Book Description
Misogyny and its opposite, philogyny, have been perennial topics in Western literature from its earliest days to the present day, but only at certain historic periods have pro-woman authors challenged fundamental negative assumptions about women by engaging in formal debate with misogynists and juxtaposing these two attitudes toward women in pairs or series of texts devoted exclusively to discussing womankind. This dialectic of attack on and defence of the female sex, known as the querelle des femmes (debate about women), was especially popular among authors and readers during the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries in England. At least 36 texts exclusively devoted to attacking and/or defending women were published in the hundred years between 1540 and 1640. The works included in these two volumes exemplify the content and the methods of debate in England during those two centuries. Volume one includes texts from 1521 through to 1615.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351895540
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 446
Book Description
Misogyny and its opposite, philogyny, have been perennial topics in Western literature from its earliest days to the present day, but only at certain historic periods have pro-woman authors challenged fundamental negative assumptions about women by engaging in formal debate with misogynists and juxtaposing these two attitudes toward women in pairs or series of texts devoted exclusively to discussing womankind. This dialectic of attack on and defence of the female sex, known as the querelle des femmes (debate about women), was especially popular among authors and readers during the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries in England. At least 36 texts exclusively devoted to attacking and/or defending women were published in the hundred years between 1540 and 1640. The works included in these two volumes exemplify the content and the methods of debate in England during those two centuries. Volume one includes texts from 1521 through to 1615.
Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama
Author: Daniel Cadman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317052110
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama examines the development of neo-Senecan drama, also known as ’closet drama’, during the years 1590-1613. It is the first book-length study since 1924 to consider these plays - the dramatic works of Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel, Samuel Brandon, Fulke Greville, Sir William Alexander, and Elizabeth Cary, along with the Roman tragedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Kyd - as a coherent group. Daniel Cadman suggests these works interrogate the relations between sovereigns and subjects during the early modern period by engaging with the humanist discourses of republicanism and stoicism. Cadman argues that the texts under study probe various aspects of this dynamic and illuminate the ways in which stoicism and republicanism provide essential frameworks for negotiating this relationship between the marginalized courtier and the absolute sovereign. He demonstrates how aristocrats and courtiers, such as Sidney, Greville, Alexander, and Cary, were able to use the neo-Senecan form to consider aspects of their limited political agency under an absolute monarch, while others, such as Brandon and Daniel, respond to similarly marginalized positions within both political and patronage networks. In analyzing how these plays illuminate various aspects of early modern political culture, this book addresses several gaps in the scholarship of early modern drama and explores new contexts in relation to more familiar writers, as well as extending the critical debate to include hitherto neglected authors.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317052110
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama examines the development of neo-Senecan drama, also known as ’closet drama’, during the years 1590-1613. It is the first book-length study since 1924 to consider these plays - the dramatic works of Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel, Samuel Brandon, Fulke Greville, Sir William Alexander, and Elizabeth Cary, along with the Roman tragedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Kyd - as a coherent group. Daniel Cadman suggests these works interrogate the relations between sovereigns and subjects during the early modern period by engaging with the humanist discourses of republicanism and stoicism. Cadman argues that the texts under study probe various aspects of this dynamic and illuminate the ways in which stoicism and republicanism provide essential frameworks for negotiating this relationship between the marginalized courtier and the absolute sovereign. He demonstrates how aristocrats and courtiers, such as Sidney, Greville, Alexander, and Cary, were able to use the neo-Senecan form to consider aspects of their limited political agency under an absolute monarch, while others, such as Brandon and Daniel, respond to similarly marginalized positions within both political and patronage networks. In analyzing how these plays illuminate various aspects of early modern political culture, this book addresses several gaps in the scholarship of early modern drama and explores new contexts in relation to more familiar writers, as well as extending the critical debate to include hitherto neglected authors.