This original book challenges prevailing accounts of English literary history, arguing that English literature emerged as a distinct category during the late sixteenth century, as England's relationship with classical Rome was suffering an unprecedented strain. Exploring the myths through which poets such as Geffrey Whitney, William Shakespeare, and John Milton understood the nature of their art, Sean Keilen shows how they invented archaic origins for a new kind of writing.
When history obliged English poets to regard themselves as victims of the Roman Conquest rather than rightful heirs...

The boundaries separating Literary Studies from other kinds of humanistic inquiry are more permeable now than at any moment since the Enlightenment, when disciplinary categories began to acquire their modern definition. The Forms of Renaissance Thought celebrates scholarship at a number of these frontiers. The contributors address works of the European Renaissance as they relate both to the textured world of their origins and to a modern scholarly culture that turns to the early moderns for methodological provocation and renewal. In this way, the volume charts the most important developments...

In this wide-ranging and ambitiously conceived Research Companion, contributors explore Shakespeare's relationship to the classic in two broad senses. The essays analyze Shakespeare's specific debts to classical works and weigh his classicism's likeness and unlikeness to that of others in his time; they also evaluate the effects of that classical influence to assess the extent to which it is connected with whatever qualities still make Shakespeare, himself, a classic (arguably the classic) of modern world literature and drama. The first sense of the classic which the volume addresses...