Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton

Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton PDF Author: Ann Baynes Coiro
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781139889438
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"Reading literary texts in their historical contexts has been the dominant form of interpretation in literary criticism for the past thirty years. This collection of essays reflects on the origins of historicism and its present usefulness as a mode of literary analysis, its limitations, and its future. The volume provides a brief history of the practice from its renaissance origins, offering examples of historicist work that not only demonstrate the continuing vitality of this methodology but also suggest new directions for research. Focusing on the major figures of Shakespeare and Milton, these essays provide important and concise representations of trends in the field. Designed for scholars and students of early modern English literature (1500-1700), the volume will also be of interest to students of literature more generally and to historians"--

Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton

Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton PDF Author: Ann Baynes Coiro
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781139889438
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book

Book Description
"Reading literary texts in their historical contexts has been the dominant form of interpretation in literary criticism for the past thirty years. This collection of essays reflects on the origins of historicism and its present usefulness as a mode of literary analysis, its limitations, and its future. The volume provides a brief history of the practice from its renaissance origins, offering examples of historicist work that not only demonstrate the continuing vitality of this methodology but also suggest new directions for research. Focusing on the major figures of Shakespeare and Milton, these essays provide important and concise representations of trends in the field. Designed for scholars and students of early modern English literature (1500-1700), the volume will also be of interest to students of literature more generally and to historians"--

Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton

Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton PDF Author: Ann Baynes Coiro
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107027519
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This volume explores the history and practice of historicism and its present usefulness for literary criticism, its limitations and its future.

Shakespeare's History Plays

Shakespeare's History Plays PDF Author: Neema Parvini
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 147442354X
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Shakespeare's History Plays boldly moves criticism of Shakespeare's history plays beyond anti-humanist theoretical approaches. This important intervention in the critical and theoretical discourse of Shakespeare studies summarises, evaluates and ultimately calls time on the mode of criticism that has prevailed in Shakespeare studies over the past thirty years. It heralds a new, more dynamic way of reading Shakespeare as a supremely intelligent and creative political thinker, whose history plays address and illuminate the very questions with which cultural historicists have been so preoccupied since the 1980s. In providing bold and original readings of the first and second tetralogies (Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II and Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2), the book reignites old debates and re-energises recent bids to humanise Shakespeare and to restore agency to the individual in the critical readings of his plays

Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory

Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory PDF Author: Neema Parvini
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 147424100X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Over the past three decades, no critical movement has been more prominent in Shakespeare Studies than new historicism. And yet, it remains notoriously difficult to pin down, define and explain, let alone analyze. Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory provides a comprehensive scholarly analysis of new historicism as a development in Shakespeare studies while asking fundamental questions about its status as literary theory and its continued usefulness as a method of approaching Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare's Political Imagination

Shakespeare's Political Imagination PDF Author: Philip Goldfarb Styrt
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350173991
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Shakespeare's Political Imagination argues that to better understand Shakespeare's plays it is essential to look at the historicism of setting: how the places and societies depicted in the plays were understood in the period when they were written. This book offers us new readings of neglected critical moments in key plays, such as Malcolm's final speech in Macbeth and the Duke's inaction in The Merchant of Venice, by investigating early modern views about each setting and demonstrating how the plays navigate between those contemporary perspectives. Divided into three parts, this book explores Shakespeare's historicist use of medieval Britain and Scotland in King John and Macbeth; ancient Rome in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus; and Renaissance Europe through Venice and Vienna in The Merchant of Venice, Othello and Measure for Measure. Philip Goldfarb Styrt argues that settings are a powerful component in Shakespeare's worlds that not only function as physical locations, but are a mechanism through which he communicates the political and social orders of the plays. Reading the plays in light of these social and political contexts reveals Shakespeare's dramatic method: how he used competing cultural narratives about other cultures to situate the action of his plays. These fresh insights encourage us to move away from overly localized or universalized readings of the plays and re-discover hidden moments and meanings that have long been obscured.

Milton, Drama, and Greek Texts

Milton, Drama, and Greek Texts PDF Author: Tania Demetriou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351341316
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
This collection reconsiders Milton’s engagement with Greek texts, with particular attention to the theological and theatrical meanings attached to Greek in the early modern period. Responding to new scholarship on early modern reactions to Greek authors – especially Euripides and Homer, Milton’s particular favourites – the collection emphasizes the associations of Greek with both Protestantism and the origins of tragedy, two arenas frequently in tension, but crucially linked in Milton’s literary imagination. The contributions explore a range of works spanning the whole of Milton’s career, from the early masque Comus, through the political and religious prose, to the 1671 closet drama, Samson Agonistes. They consider the ways in which the authority and controversy attached to Greek authors framed Milton’s approaches to their texts. Looking at both the texts and their interpretative traditions together, this book suggests that Greek authors shaped Milton’s attitudes to drama in ways even more extensive and surprising than we have yet recognized. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Seventeenth Century.

Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England

Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England PDF Author: Allison P. Hobgood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107041287
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England examines the emotional effect of stage performance on the minds of the early modern theatre audience.

Milton Now

Milton Now PDF Author: C. Gray
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137383100
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
By bringing together Milton specialists with other innovative early modern scholars, the collection aims to embrace and encourage a methodologically adventurous study of Milton's works, analyzing them both in relation to their own moment and their many ensuing contexts.

Milton in the Long Restoration

Milton in the Long Restoration PDF Author: Blair Hoxby
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191082406
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description
Milton criticism often treats the poet as if he were the last of the Renaissance poets or a visionary prophet who remained misunderstood until he was read by the Romantics. At the same time, literary histories of the period often invoke a Long Eighteenth Century that reaches its climax with the French Revolution or the Reform Bill of 1832. What gets overlooked in such accounts is the rich story of Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early eighteenth-century heirs. The essays in this collection demonstrate that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than Romantic and twentieth-century interpreters. The translations, editions, and commentaries produced by early eighteenth century men of letters emerge as the seedbed of modern criticism and the term 'neoclassical' is itself unmasked as an inadequate characterization of the literary criticism and poetry of the period—a period that could brilliantly define a Miltonic sublime, even as it supported and described all the varieties of parody and domestication found in the mock epic and the novel. These essays, which are written by a team of leading Miltonists and scholars of the Restoration and eighteenth century, cover a range of topics—from Milton's early editors and translators to his first theatrical producers; from Miltonic similes in Pope's Iliad to Miltonic echoes in Austen's Pride and Prejudice; from marriage, to slavery, to republicanism, to the heresy of Arianism. What they share in common is a conviction that the early eighteenth century understood Milton and that the Long Restoration cannot be understood without him.

The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage

The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage PDF Author: Thomas Fulton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107194237
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The first volume to consider how the context of early modern biblical interpretation shaped Shakespeare's plays.