Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Renaissance

Using both canonical and underappreciated texts, Alien Albion argues that early modern England was far less unified and xenophobic than literary critics have previously suggested. Juxtaposing literary texts from the period with legal, religious, and economic documents, Scott Oldenburg uncovers how immigrants to England forged ties with their English hosts and how those relationships were reflected in literature that imagined inclusive, multicultural communities.

Through discussions of civic pageantry, the plays of dramatists including William Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, and...

From antiquity through the Renaissance, Homer s epic poems the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the various mock-epics incorrectly ascribed to him served as a lens through which readers, translators, and writers interpreted contemporary conflicts. They looked to Homer for wisdom about the danger and the value of strife, embracing his works as a mythographic shorthand with which to describe and interpret the era s intellectual, political, and theological struggles.

Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes elegantly exposes the ways in which writers and...

"Disknowledge": knowing something isn't true, but believing it anyway. In "Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England," Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even as the shortcomings of Renaissance humanism became plain to see, many intellectuals of the age had little choice but to treat their familiar knowledge systems as though they still held. Humanism thus came to share the status of alchemy: a way of thinking simultaneously productive and suspect, reasonable and wrongheaded.

Eggert...

Model court conduct in the Renaissance shared many rhetorical features with poetry. Analyzing these stylistic affinities, Professor Javitch shows that the rise of the courtly ideal enhanced the status of poetic art. He suggests a new explanation for the fostering of poetic talents by courtly establishments and proposes that the court stimulated these talents more decisively than the Renaissance school.

The author focuses on late Tudor England and considers how Queen Elizabeth's court helped poetry gain strength by subscribing to a code of behavior as artificial as that prescribed by...

In 1462 Pope Pius II performed the only reverse canonization in history, publicly damning a living man. The target was Sigismondo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini and a patron of the arts with ties to the Florentine Renaissance. Condemned to an afterlife of torment, he was burned in effigy in several places in Rome. What had this cultivated nobleman done to merit such a fate?

Pagan Virtue in a Christian World examines anew the contributions and contradictions of the Italian Renaissance, and in particular how the recovery of Greek and Roman literature and art led to a revival of pagan...

This volume focuses on hospitality as a theoretically and historically crucial phenomenon in Shakespeare's work with ramifications for contemporary thought and practice. Drawing a multifaceted picture of Shakespeare's scenes of hospitality with their numerous scenes of greeting, feeding, entertaining, and sheltering the collection demonstrates how hospitality provides a compelling frame for the core ethical, political, theological, and ecological questions of Shakespeare's time and our own. By reading Shakespeare's plays in conjunction with contemporary theory as well as early modern texts...

Hate, malice, rage, and enmity: what would Shakespeare's plays be without these demonic, unruly passions? This book studies how the tirades and unrestrained villainy of Shakespeare's art explode the decorum and safety of our sanitized lives and challenge the limits of our selfhood. Everyone knows Shakespeare to be the exemplary poet of love, but how many celebrate his clarifying expressions of hatred? How many of us do not at some time feel that we have come away from his plays transformed by hate and washed clean by savage indignation? Saval fills the great gap in the interpretation of...

This 1986 study offers a challenging contribution to the on-going critical debate surrounding the English literary Renaissance. Although informed by the new historicism and post-structuralism, Hidden Designs makes a plea for criticism to be practiced in its own name rather than in the name of theory, and opposes the hyper-professionalisation of literary studies in favour of the broader communal functions of criticism.

Major Renaissance authors and their recent critics are placed under suspicion as Crewe explores the elements of criminality inherent in the powerful interests...

The Shakespearean World takes a global view of Shakespeare and his works, especially their afterlives. Constantly changing, the Shakespeare central to this volume has acquired an array of meanings over the past four centuries. "Shakespeare" signifies the historical person, as well as the plays and verse attributed to him. It also signifies the attitudes towards both author and works determined by their receptions. Throughout the book, specialists aim to situate Shakespeare's world and what the world is because of him. In adopting a global perspective, the volume arranges...