Edmund Spenser (c.1552-99) conducted two careers at once: a celebrated poet, he also pursued a lifelong career as secretary to various political and ecclesiastical figures. Richard Rambuss's ground-breaking book explores the ways in which this latter profession informed his poetic career. It argues that for Spenser, the manipulation of secrets provided a strategy for self-promotion and a means of measuring his distance from royal and aristocratic power. The study presents a new picture of Spenser and examines ideas of gender, power, and subjecthood in the Renaissance.
Edmund Spenser (c.1552-99) conducted two careers at once: a celebrated poet, he also pursued a lifelong career as secretary to various political and e...
What were the possibilities of prose as a literary medium in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? And how did it operate in the literary and social worlds? The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World brings together ten new essays by leading scholars of the literatures of England, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, and the colonial Americas, to answer these questions in wide-ranging ways. Several of the essays shed new light on landmark prose works of the period; some discuss what lesser-known writings reveal about the medium; others move between the literary and the...
What were the possibilities of prose as a literary medium in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? And how did it operate in the literary and socia...
This collection of essays brings together leading scholars of the early modern period, and offers a new focus on the literature and culture of the Renaissance. Traditionally, Renaissance studies has concentrated on the human subject; the essays collected here bring objects--purses, clothes, tapestries, houses, maps, feathers, tools, skulls--back into view. Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture puts things back into relation with people, eliciting not only new critical readings of key texts, but also new configurations of Renaissance culture.
This collection of essays brings together leading scholars of the early modern period, and offers a new focus on the literature and culture of the Ren...
This collection of essays brings together leading scholars of the early modern period, and offers a new focus on the literature and culture of the Renaissance. Traditionally, Renaissance studies has concentrated on the human subject; the essays collected here bring objects--purses, clothes, tapestries, houses, maps, feathers, tools, skulls--back into view. Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture puts things back into relation with people, eliciting not only new critical readings of key texts, but also new configurations of Renaissance culture.
This collection of essays brings together leading scholars of the early modern period, and offers a new focus on the literature and culture of the Ren...
Shakespeare's images of the exotic are shown to be firmly based on the margins of contemporary maps; and examination of the icons and emblems of maps raises questions about the mapmakers' overt intentions and instinctive assumptions, and reveals connections between the semiology of a map and that of the theater.
Shakespeare's images of the exotic are shown to be firmly based on the margins of contemporary maps; and examination of the icons and emblems of maps ...
To recent studies of Renaissance subjectivity, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England contributes the argument that masculinity is unavoidably anxious and volatile in cultures that distribute power and authority according to patriarchal prerogatives. Drawing from current arguments in feminism, cultural studies, historicism, psychoanalysis and gay studies, Mark Breitenberg explores the dialectic of desire and anxiety in masculine subjectivity in the work of a wide range of writers, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Burton, and the women writers of the "querelles des femmes" debate, especially...
To recent studies of Renaissance subjectivity, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England contributes the argument that masculinity is unavoidably an...
In the decades leading up to England's first permanent American colony, the literature that emerged needed to establish certain realities against a background of skepticism, and it also had to find ways of theorizing the enterprise. The voyage narratives evolved almost from the outset as a genre concerned with recuperating failure--as noble, strategic, even as a form of success. Reception of these texts since the Victorian era has often accepted their claims of heroism and mastery; this study argues for a more complicated, less glorious history.
In the decades leading up to England's first permanent American colony, the literature that emerged needed to establish certain realities against a ba...
To recent studies of Renaissance subjectivity, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England contributes the argument that masculinity is unavoidably anxious and volatile in cultures that distribute power and authority according to patriarchal prerogatives. Drawing from current arguments in feminism, cultural studies, historicism, psychoanalysis and gay studies, Mark Breitenberg explores the dialectic of desire and anxiety in masculine subjectivity in the work of a wide range of writers, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Burton, and the women writers of the "querelles des femmes" debate, especially...
To recent studies of Renaissance subjectivity, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England contributes the argument that masculinity is unavoidably an...
The experience of powerful emotion has always been central to dramatic presentation and audience response. In this study, T. G. Bishop examines ways in which wonder has been used by playwrights as an integral part of theater in classical and medieval drama and explores wonder in Shakespeare's work through extended readings of The Comedy of Errors, Pericles and The Winter's Tale. By focusing on how characters feel, and how the story of these feelings is told and evaluated, this study offers a new approach to understanding plays.
The experience of powerful emotion has always been central to dramatic presentation and audience response. In this study, T. G. Bishop examines ways i...
The Poetics of English Nationhood is a study of the formation of English national identity during the early modern period. Claire McEachern shows how the representation of faith, fatherland and crown in Tudor texts continually personified English political institutions. Those texts we traditionally label literary, she argues, already encode and personify power relations, thereby reinforcing the idea of the nation as an imaginary force. McEachern's study revises our understanding of the term "literary" through an examination of Spenser, Shakespeare and Drayton, tracing the means by which an...
The Poetics of English Nationhood is a study of the formation of English national identity during the early modern period. Claire McEachern shows how ...
