Exploring how attitudes toward human emotions changed in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this book emphasizes the shared concerns of the 'non-literary' and 'literary' texts produced by Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Robert Burton, and John Milton. Douglas Trevor asserts that 'scholarly' practices such as glossing texts and appending sidenotes influenced the methods by which these writers came to analyze their own moods.

Why were sonnet sequences popular in Renaissance England? In this study, Christopher Warley suggests that sonneteers created a vocabulary to describe, and to invent, new forms of social distinction before an explicit language of social class existed. The tensions inherent in the genre - between lyric and narrative, between sonnet and sequence - offered writers a means of reconceptualizing the relation between individuals and society, a way to try to come to grips with the broad social transformations taking place at the end of the sixteenth century. By stressing the struggle over social...

Examining sixteenth and seventeenth century conceptions of memory and forgetting, this study demonstrates their importance to the drama and culture of the time. Garrett A. Sullivan discusses memory and forgetting in terms of which a variety of behaviors--from seeking salvation to pursuing vengeance to succumbing to desire--are conceptualized. Focusing on works such as Macbeth, Hamlet, Dr. Faustus and The Duchess of Malfi, he reveals memory and forgetting to be dynamic cultural forces central to early modern understandings of embodiment, selfhood and social practice.

Through examining some of the everyday items that helped establish a person's masculinity or femininity, this book offers a new analysis of gender identity in early modern English literature and culture. Individual chapters focus on items such as codpieces, handkerchiefs, beards, and hair. Fisher argues that these seemingly peripheral parts were in fact constitutive, and consequently that early modern gender was materialized through a relatively wide range of parts or features, and that it was also often conceptualized as being malleable. The book deliberately brings together sexual...

Michael Schoenfeldt's fascinating study explores the close relationship between selves and bodies, psychological inwardness and corporeal processes, as they are represented in English Renaissance literature. After Galen, the predominant medical paradigm of the period envisaged a self governed by humors, literally embodying inner emotion by locating and explaining human passion within a taxonomy of internal organs and fluids. It thus gave a profoundly material emphasis to behavioral phenomena, giving the poets of the period a vital and compelling vocabulary for describing the ways in which...

In early modern England, boys and girls learned to be masculine or feminine as they learned to read and write. This book explores how gender differences, instilled through specific methods of instruction in literacy, were scrutinized in the English public theater. Close readings of plays from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost to Thomas Dekker's Whore of Babylon, and of poems, didactic treatises and autobiographical writings from the same period, offer a richly textured analysis of the interaction among didactic precepts, literary models, and historical men and women.

This is a full-length study of the use of the dialogue form in Italy from the early sixteenth century until Galileo. Drawing on a wide range of sources, it examines the characteristics which determined the genre's unrivalled popularity in the period as a vehicle for polemic, debate, technical exposition and comic drama. More than simply an account of the development of an individual literary genre, however, the book is a contribution to the broader social and cultural history of the period. As representations of conversation, miniature dramas of persuasion, the dialogues of the Italian...

When Hamlet complains that Guildenstern "would pluck out the heart of my mystery," he imagines an encounter that recurs insistently in the discourses of early modern England: the struggle by one man to discover the secrets in another's heart. Elizabeth Hanson examines the records of state torture, plays by Shakespeare and Jonson, "cony-catching" pamphlets and Francis Bacon's philosophical writing to demonstrate a reconceptualizing of the "subject" in both the political and philosophical sense of the term.

A study of the popularity of sonnet sequences in Renaissance England.

Exploring how attitudes toward human emotions changed in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this book emphasizes the shared concerns of the 'non-literary' and 'literary' texts produced by Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Robert Burton, and John Milton. Douglas Trevor asserts that 'scholarly' practices such as glossing texts and appending sidenotes influenced the methods by which these writers came to analyze their own moods.