Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Renaissance

This ambitious work aims to utterly change the way Don Quixote and Cervantes' other works are read, particularly the posthumous The Trial of Persiles and Sigismunda. William Childers sets out to free Cervantes' work from its context within the histories of the European national literatures. Instead, he examines early modern Spanish cultural production as an antecedent to contemporary postcolonial literature, especially Latin American fiction of the past half century.

In order to construct his new context for reading Cervantes, Childers proceeds in three distinct phases....

The Roman poet Ovid was one of the most-imitated classical writers of the Elizabethan age and a touchstone for generations of English writers. In The Ovidian Vogue, Daniel Moss argues that poets appropriated Ovid not just to connect with the ancient past but also to communicate and compete within late Elizabethan literary culture.

Moss explains how in the 1590s rising stars like Thomas Nashe and William Shakespeare adopted Ovidian language to introduce themselves to patrons and rivals, while established figures like Edmund Spenser and Michael Drayton alluded to Ovid's works...

Although there has been a general revival of interest in Ben Jonson's dramatic work in the past twenty years, little critical effort has been directed to his late plays -- dismissed by John Dryden as the "dotages" of an aging mind. Through a close reading of The Devil Is an Ass, The Staple of News, The New Inn, and The Magnetic Lady in light of Jonson's own theories of comedy, author Larry S. Champion demonstrates that they reveal the same precise construction and dramatic control found in his acclaimed masterpieces. Furthermore, these works reflect Jonson's...

Richard Crashaw's use of rhyme is one of the distinctive aspects of his poetic technique, and in the first systematic analysis of his rhyme craft, Mary Ellen Rickey concludes that he was keenly interested in rhyme as a technical device. She traces Crashaw's development of rhyme repetitions from the simple designs of his early epigrams and secular poems to the elaborate and irregular schemes of his mature verse.

Jorge Manrique was the greatest poet of fifteenth-century Castile and one of the three or four greatest in Spanish literature. Frank A. Dominguez offers here an introduction to Manrique's poetry and the first book-length study of him in English in fifty years.

After presenting the biographical and historical context of Manrique's poetry, Dominguez examines the poet's love lyrics, describing the large fund of commonplaces and forms that Manrique's verses share with those of other poets of his age. Manrique's highly stylized language and parallel verse structures express the obsession...

George Herbert has always been regarded as a man of singular piety and a poet of uncommon technical ability. Until recent times, however, he was usually thought to have written prosodically ingenious but conceptually thin verse. Mary Ellen Rickey, through a close examination of Herbert's poetry, reveals the high concentration of ideas in his verse and the richness of his imagery.

The twelve essays in this fiorilegio of the work of Otis H. Green afford a representative view of the thought and scholarship of one of the world's foremost Hispanists. In each of them is developed some important facet of the intellectual milieu of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, reflecting Otis Green's life-long and wide-ranging quest for evidence that would broaden our understanding of those complex periods and correct the misapprehensions which have gathered about them. Included are important sections of his great work, Spain and the Western Tradition and essays from...

This book, winner of the 1969 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Award, presents a new perspective in the criticism of Jacobean tragedy and a truer evaluation of this body of drama. Mr. Herndl reinterprets a number of important Jacobean plays, making clear their essential spirit and the world view from which it rises. Herndl demonstrates the radical difference between this tragic spirit and that of the tradition culminating in Shakespeare which was based on the medieval conception of Natural Law. He traces the religious and philosophical history which shaped the drama of both...

Philippe de Vigneulles (1471--1528), cloth merchant and hosier from the city of Metz, wrote a collection of comic short stories which he called Cent Nouvelles ou contes joyeux. The work constitutes an important step in the development of the nouvelle form in France. In an extended explication, Ms. Kotin analyzes the tales for the modern reader, historically, generically, structurally, and in terms of their human significance.

Inscribed in a tradition of short narrative forms in late medieval and early Renaissance France, these tales remake or recast traditional narrative patterns...

Giraldi Cinthio's Discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi, here translated into English for the first time, was one of the most important critical works of the Renaissance. Written as a defense of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Giraldi's discourse is an inquiry both into the nature of poetry and into the characteristics of the "heroic" or epic genre, in which some of the world's richest poems fall.

Henry L. Snuggs introduces this translation with an incisive interpretation of Giraldi's critical theory. Giraldi was the first, Snuggs states, to make a significant plea in...

Worldmaking Spenser reexamines the role of Spenser's work in English history and highlights the richness and complexity of his understanding of place. The volume centers on the idea that complex and allusive literary works such as The Faerie Queene must be read in the context of the cultural, literary, political, economic, and ideological forces at play in the highly allegorical poem. The authors define Spenser as the maker of poetic worlds, of the Elizabethan world, and of the modern world. The essays look at Spenser from three distinct vantage points. The contributors...

In his letter Against Monastic Life (1514 1517), Andrea Alciato, an Italian jurist and writer famous for his Emblemata, urges his friend Bernardus Mattius to reconsider his choice of monastic life. Alciato makes his argument by criticizing religious superstition, the Church's hierarchy, and monastic practices, particularly the Franciscans hypocrisy, wealth, and divisiveness. Instead, he defends a stoic, civic humanism. Due to the troubled history of this unique manuscript and the inadequacies of the two subsequent editions, Alciato s discourse has been obscured for centuries....