Title: Green thoughts, green shades: essays by contemporary poets on the early modern lyric 
Author: Post, Jonathan F. S 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Literature | Poetry | Renaissance  Literature
Publisher's Description: Green Thoughts, Green Shades is a strikingly original book, the first and only of its kind. Edited and introduced by noted seventeenth-century scholar Jonathan Post, it enlists the analytic and verbal power of some of today's most celebrated poets to illuminate from the inside out a number of the greatest lyric poets writing in English during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Written by people who spend much of their time thinking in verse and about verse, these original essays herald the return of the early modern lyric as crucial to understanding the present moment of poetry in the United States. This work provides fascinating insights into what today's poets find of special interest in their forebears. In addition, these discussions shed light on the contributors' own poetry and offer compelling clues to how the poetry of the past continues to inform that of the present.   [brief]
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Title: Trials of authorship: anterior forms and poetic reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare 
Author: Crewe, Jonathan V
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | Renaissance  Literature | English Literature
Publisher's Description: For more than a decade, the English Renaissance has been the scene of trial for the critical methodologies of deconstruction, feminism, new historicism, psychoanalytic poststructuralism, and cultural studies. Jonathan Crewe argues that the commitment in the prevailing criticism to innovation, transgression, and radical change has increasingly obscured some powerfully conservative elements both in Renaissance culture and in these critical discourses themselves.In a reading of the poets Wyatt, Surrey, and Gascoigne, and of the biographies of Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey, Crewe focuses on the relatively stable poetic and cultural forms operative in the Renaissance. He argues that these established forms, which shape poetic composition, social interaction, and individual identity, are subject to only limited reconstruction by English authors in the sixteenth century. They both facilitate and limit literary and social expression and result in more sharply conflicted literary production than contemporary critics have been willing to acknowledge. Crewe concentrates on authors whose canonical status is somewhat precarious and intentionally shifts the emphasis away from the Elizabethan period and toward that of Henry VIII. Trials of Authorship redraws the existing picture of the English Renaissance in the sixteenth century.   [brief]
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Title: Cervantes and the burlesque sonnet 
Author: Martín, Adrienne Laskier
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | Poetry | Renaissance  Literature
Publisher's Description: Until now the great renown of Cervantes as a prose humorist has eclipsed his skill as a humorous poet. Cervantes and the Burlesque Sonnet amply illustrates the comic genius of Cervantes the poet, and at the same time establishes criteria by which comic poetry can be analyzed and evaluated.Adrienne Martín identifies Cervantes's pivotal role within the history of the European burlesque sonnet, whose unique aesthetic conventions lead her to a new definition of Renaissance literary humor as the self-conscious expression of human folly. In Don Quixote , and in the Don Quixote sonnets, Cervantes not only adopts and refines this notion of madness but also transforms the burlesque sonnet tradition inherited from Italy and from his predecessors in Spain by intermingling several different comic currents.Cervantes uses humor to point out our complex, paradoxical, quintessentially human nature and brings renewed vigor, critical and intellectual depth, different concerns, and an original tone to the burlesque. He frees comic poetry from its traditional marginal status and facilitates the subsequent explosion of burlesque and satire seen in Spain's baroque poets. Excellent translations of more than sixty Italian and Spanish sonnets enhance Martín's fine analysis.   [brief]
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Title: Knights at court: courtliness, chivalry, & courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance 
Author: Scaglione, Aldo D
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | European Literature | Medieval Studies | Renaissance  Literature
Publisher's Description: Knights at Court is a grand tour and survey of manners, manhood, and court life in the Middle Ages, like no other in print. Composed on an epic canvas, this authoritative work traces the development of court culture and its various manifestations from the latter years of the Holy Roman Empire (ca. A.D. 1000) to the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.Leading medievalist and Renaissance scholar Aldo Scaglione offers a sweeping sociological view of three geographic areas that reveals a surprising continuity of courtly forms and motifs: German romances; the lyrical and narrative literature of northern and southern France; Italy's chivalric poetry. Scaglione discusses a broad number of texts, from early Norman and Flemish baronial chronicles to the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the troubadours and Minnesingers. He delves into the Niebelungenlied, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and an array of treatises on conduct down to Castiglione and his successors.All these works and Scaglione's superior scholarship attest to the enduring power over minds and hearts of a mentality that issued from a small minority of people - the courtiers and knights - in central positions of leadership and power. Knights at Court is for all scholars and students interested in "the civilizing process."   [brief]
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Title: Orphans of Petrarch: poetry and theory in the Spanish Renaissance 
Author: Navarrete, Ignacio Enrique 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Poetry | Renaissance  Literature
Publisher's Description: In Spain as elsewhere, Renaissance poets transformed the lyric tradition by using Petrarch as a source of poetic renewal. But political unity and military hegemony, coupled with a sense of cultural inferiority and an obsession with ethnic purity, made Spain different. Drawing on modern critical theory, Ignacio Navarrete offers a new exposition of the development of Spanish Renaissance poetics. Grounded in both philology and cultural theory, Orphans of Petrarch is the first book to integrate the "Spanish difference" into an understanding of Renaissance lyric as a European phenomenon.   [brief]
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Title: Faultlines: cultural materialism and the politics of dissident reading 
Author: Sinfield, Alan
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Renaissance  Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: If we come to consciousness within a language that is complicit with the social order, how can we conceive, let alone organize, resistance to that social order? This key question in the politics of reading and subcultural practice informs Alan Sinfield's book on writing in early-modern England.New historicism has often shown people trapped in a web of language and culture. In lively discussions of writings by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney, and Donne, Sinfield reassesses the scope of dissidence and control. The early-modern state, Christianity, and the cultural apparatus, despite an ideology of unity and explicit violence, could not but allow space to challenging voices. Sinfield shows that disruptions in concepts of hierarchy, nationality, gender, and sexuality force their way into literary texts.Sinfield is often provocative. He "rewrites" Julius Caesar to produce a different politics, compares Sidney's idea of poetry to Leonid Brezhnev's, and reinstates the concept of character in the face of post-structuralist theory. He keeps the current politics of literary study in view, especially in a substantial chapter on Shakespeare in the U.S. Sinfield subjects interactions between class, ethnicity, sexuality, and the professional structures of the humanities to a detailed and hard-hitting critique, and argues for new commitments to collectivities and subcultures.   [brief]
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Title: Inscribing the time: Shakespeare and the end of Elizabethan England 
Author: Mallin, Eric Scott
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Renaissance  Literature
Publisher's Description: Combining the resources of new historicism, feminism, and postmodern textual analysis, Eric Mallin reveals how contemporary pressures left their marks on three Shakespeare plays written at the end of Elizabeth's reign. Close attention to the language of Troilus and Cressida , Hamlet , and Twelfth Night reveals the ways the plays echo the events and anxieties that accompanied the beginning of the seventeenth century. Troilus reflects the rebellion of the Earl of Essex and the failure of the courtly, chivalric style. Hamlet resonates with the danger of the bubonic plague and the difficult succession history of James I. Twelfth Night is imbued with nostalgia for an earlier period of Elizabeth's rule, when her control over religious and erotic affairs seemed more secure.   [brief]
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Title: The rest is silence: death as annihilation in the English Renaissance 
Author: Watson, Robert N
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Renaissance  Literature
Publisher's Description: How did the fear of death coexist with the promise of Christian afterlife in the culture and literature of the English Renaissance? Robert Watson exposes a sharp edge of blasphemous protest against mortality that runs through revenge plays such as The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet , and through plays of procreation such as Measure for Measure and Macbeth . Tactics of denial appear in the vengefulness that John Donne directs toward female bodies for failing to bestow immortality, and in the promise of renewal that George Herbert sets against the threat of closure.Placing these literary manifestations in the context of specific Jacobean deathbed crises and modern cultural distortions, Watson explores the psychological roots and political consequences of denying that death permanently erases sensation and consciousness.   [brief]
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Title: Resistant structures: particularity, radicalism, and Renaissance texts 
Author: Strier, Richard
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Renaissance  Literature | English Literature
Publisher's Description: Taking Wittgenstein's "Don't think, but look" as his motto, Richard Strier argues against the application of a priori schemes to Renaissance (and all) texts. He argues for the possibility and desirability of rigorously attentive but "pre-theoretical" reading. His approach privileges particularity and attempts to respect the "resistant structures" of texts. He opposes theories, critical and historical, that dictate in advance what texts must - or cannot - say or do.The first part of the book, "Against Schemes," demonstrates, in discussions of Rosemond Tuve, Stephen Greenblatt, and Stanley Fish among others, how both historicist and purely theoretical approaches can equally produce distortion of particulars. The second part, "Against Received Ideas," shows how a variety of texts (by Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and others) have been seen through the lenses of fixed, mainly conservative ideas in ways that have obscured their actual, surprising, and sometimes surprisingly radical content.   [brief]
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Title: Rabelais's carnival: text, context, metatext 
Author: Kinser, Sam
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | European Literature | Renaissance  Literature
Publisher's Description: How is it possible, after four centuries, that a major episode in Rabelais's novels remains systematically misread? The episode, which playfully and grotesquely treats the relation of Carnival to Lent, occurs in Rabelais's Fourth Book , his last and most artfully crafted novel. Samuel Kinser argues that the text has been distorted because critics have not attended to the episode's performative as well as literary contexts, overlooking the innovative use Rabelais made in his work of his immediate world. In this original interpretation of the Fourth Book , Kinser evokes the gestures, games, and visual, oral, bodily semantics of Carnival and Lent as they were performed in Rabelais's day. He also underscores the importance to Rabelais of the invention of printing, an innovation which revolutionized the relationships of author and reader. Understanding this and fearing it, Rabelais adopted an extraordinary set of disguises as an author, disguises which in their bewildering interplay constitute the truest sense of his carnival.   [brief]
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Title: The custom of the castle: from Malory to Macbeth 
Author: Ross, Charles Stanley
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | European History | English Literature | Medieval Studies | Renaissance  Literature
Publisher's Description: The "custom of the castle" imposes strange ordeals on knights and ladies seeking hospitality - daunting, mostly evil challenges that travelers must obey or even defend. This seemingly fantastic motif, first conceived by Chrètien de Troyes in the twelfth century and widely imitated in medieval French romance, flowered again when Italian and English authors adopted it during the century before Shakespeare's plays and the rise of the novel. Unlike other scholars who have dismissed it as pure literary convention, Charles Ross finds serious social purpose behind the custom of the castle.Ross explores the changing legal and cultural conceptions of custom in France, Italy, and England to uncover a broad array of moral issues in the many castle stories. He concentrates on single scenes that are common to a series of epics, showing how their nuanced narratives reflect real social limits of order, violence, justice, civility, and political conformity. His investigation of masterpieces from the thirteenth-century Lancelot to The Faerie Queene - by way of Malory, Boiardo, and Ariosto - demonstrates for the first time the impact on Shakespeare's plays, particularly Macbeth , of an earlier way of thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of social customs.   [brief]
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Title: An empire nowhere: England, America, and literature from Utopia to The tempest 
Author: Knapp, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | United States History | Renaissance  Literature | European History
Publisher's Description: What caused England's literary renaissance? One answer has been such unprecedented developments as the European discovery of America. Yet England in the sixteenth century was far from an expanding nation. Not only did the Tudors lose England's sole remaining possessions on the Continent and, thanks to the Reformation, grow spiritually divided from the Continent as well, but every one of their attempts to colonize the New World actually failed.Jeffrey Knapp accounts for this strange combination of literary expansion and national isolation by showing how the English made a virtue of their increasing insularity. Ranging across a wide array of literary and extraliterary sources, Knapp argues that English poets rejected the worldly acquisitiveness of an empire like Spain's and took pride in England's material limitations as a sign of its spiritual strength. In the imaginary worlds of such fictions as Utopia , The Faerie Queene , and The Tempest , they sought a grander empire, founded on the "otherworldly" virtues of both England and poetry itself.   [brief]
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Title: The Renaissance Bible: scholarship, sacrifice, and subjectivity 
Author: Shuger, Debora K 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Religion | Literary Theory and Criticism | Renaissance History | Christianity | Renaissance  Literature
Publisher's Description: This is the first book on the Renaissance Bible by an Anglo-American scholar in nearly fifty years. Not confined to a history of exegesis, it is instead a study of Renaissance culture - a culture whose central text was the Bible. Shuger explores, among other topics, the links between late medieval Christology and early modern subjectivity; religious eroticism and the origins of the sexualized body; the transformation of humanist philology into comparative religion; and the representation of daughter-sacrifice and female erotic desire.   [brief]
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Title: The tragedy of Mariam, the fair queen of Jewry
Author: Cary, Elizabeth, Lady 1585 or 6-1639
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Renaissance  Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) is the first original play by a woman to be published in England, and its author is the first English woman writer to be memorialized in a biography, which is included with this edition of the play. Mariam is a distinctive example of Renaissance drama that serves the desire of today's readers and scholars to know not merely how women were represented in the early modern period but also how they themselves perceived their own condition.With this textually emended and fully annotated edition, the play will now be accessible to all readers. The accompanying biography of Cary further enriches our knowledge of both domestic and religious conflicts in the seventeenth century.   [brief]
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Title: Tran sforming desire: erotic knowledge in Books III and IV of the Faerie queene 
Author: Silberman, Lauren
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Men and Masculinity | Women's Studies | Poetry | Renaissance  Literature
Publisher's Description: The Faerie Queene anticipates postmodernist concerns with destabilizing language, and Lauren Silberman's stimulating study of Books III and IV of the poem proceeds from the assumption that Spenser has something important to say to us in the late twentieth century.In these books, Spenser exposes fictions of total control for what they are - fictions. The text affirms the value of risk and improvisation over the temptation to seek guarantees. The books examine the role of desire in moving us to function in an uncertain world and tempting us to foreclose that uncertainty by strategies that seek to frame knowledge through total mastery of it.   [brief]
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