Author: Cathy Shrank Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191514179 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
Writing the Nation in Reformation England offers a major re-evaluation of English writing between 1530 and 1580. Studying authors such as Andrew Borde, John Leland, William Thomas, Thomas Smith, and Thomas Wilson, Cathy Shrank highlights the significance of these decades to the formation of English nationhood and examines the impact of the break with Rome on the development of a national language, literary style, and canon. As well as demonstrating the close relationship between literary culture and English identities, it reinvests Tudor writers with a sense of agency. As authors, counsellors, and thinkers they were active citizens participating within, and helping to shape, a national community. In the process, their works were also used to project an image of themselves as authors, playing - and fitted to play - their part in the public domain. In showing how these writers engaged with, and promoted, concepts of national identity, the book makes a significant contribution to our broader understanding of the early modern period, demonstrating that nationhood was not a later Elizabethan phenomenon, and that the Reformation had an immediate impact on English culture, before England emerged as a 'Protestant' nation.
Author: Mike Pincombe Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191548391 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 864
Book Description
This is the first major collection of essays to look at the literature of the entire Tudor period, from the reign of Henry VII to death of Elizabeth I. It pays particularly attention to the years before 1580. Those decades saw, amongst other things, the establishment of print culture and growth of a reading public; the various phases of the English Reformation and process of political centralization that enabled and accompanied them; the increasing emulation of Continental and classical literatures under the influence of humanism; the self-conscious emergence of English as a literary language and determined creation of a native literary canon; the beginnings of English empire and the consolidation of a sense of nationhood. However, study of Tudor literature prior to 1580 is not only of worth as a context, or foundation, for an Elizabethan 'golden age'. As this much-needed volume will show, it is also of artistic, intellectual, and cultural merit in its own right. Written by experts from Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom, the forty-five chapters in The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Literature recover some of the distinctive voices of sixteenth-century writing, its energy, variety, and inventiveness. As well as essays on well-known writers, such as Philip Sidney or Thomas Wyatt, the volume contains the first extensive treatment in print of some of the Tudor era's most original voices.
Author: Kristen Poole Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812251520 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 376
Book Description
Early Modern Histories of Time examines how a range of chronological modes intrinsic to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shaped the thought-worlds of those living during this time and explores how these temporally indigenous models can productively influence our own working concepts of historical period. This innovative approach thus moves beyond debates about where we should divide linear time (and what to call the ensuing segments) to reconsider the very concept of "period." Bringing together an eminent cast of literary scholars and historians, the volume develops productive historical models by drawing on the very texts and cultural contexts that are their objects of study. What happens to the idea of "period" when English literature is properly placed within the dynamic currents of pan-European literary phenomena? How might we think of historical period through the palimpsested nature of buildings, through the religious concept of the secular, through the demographic model of the life cycle, even through the repetitive labor of laundering? From theology to material culture to the temporal constructions of Shakespeare, and from the politics of space to the poetics of typology, the essays in this volume take up diverse, complex models of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century temporality and contemplate their current relevance for our own ideas of history. The volume thus embraces the ambiguity inherent in the word "contemporary," moving between our subjects' sense of self-emplacement and the historiographical need to address the questions and concerns that affect us today. Contributors: Douglas Bruster, Euan Cameron, Heather Dubrow, Kate Giles, Tim Harris, Natasha Korda, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Kristen Poole, Ethan H. Shagan, James Simpson, Nigel Smith, Mihoko Suzuki, Gordon Teskey, Julianne Werlin, Owen Williams, Steven N. Zwicker.
Author: Chloë Houston Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317017986 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 199
Book Description
A study of European utopias in context from the early years of Henry VIII’s reign to the Restoration, this book is the first comprehensive attempt since J. C. Davis’ Utopia and the Ideal Society (1981) to understand the societies projected by utopian literature from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to the political idealism and millenarianism of the mid-seventeenth century. Where Davis concentrated on understanding utopias historically, Renaissance Utopia also seeks to make sense of utopia as a literary form, offering both a new typology of utopia and a new history of European humanist utopianism. This book examines how the utopia was transformed from an intellectual exercise in philosophical interrogation to a serious means of imagining practical social reform. In doing so it argues that the relationship between Renaissance utopia and Renaissance dialogue is crucial; the utopian mode of discourse continued to make use of aspects of dialogue even when the dialogue form itself was in decline. Exploring the ways in which utopian texts assimilated dialogue, Renaissance Utopia complements recent work by historians and literary scholars on early modern communities by providing a thorough investigation of the issues informing a way of modelling a very particular community and literary mode - the utopia.
Author: Ildikó Limpár Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443860875 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 228
Book Description
Monster studies, dystopian literature and film studies have become central to research on the now-proliferating works that give voice to culture-specific anxieties. This new development in scholarship reinforces the notion that the genres of fantasy and science fiction call for interpretations that see their spaces of imagination as reflections of reality, not as spaces invented merely to escape the real world. In this vein, Displacing the Anxieties of Our World discusses fictive spaces of literature, film, and video gaming. The eleven essays that follow the Introduction are grouped into four parts: I. “Imagined Journeys through History, Gaming and Travel”; II. “Political Anxieties and Fear of Dominance”; III. “The Space of Fantastic Science and Scholarship”; and IV. “Spaces Natural and Spaces Artificial”. The studies produce a dialogue among disciplinary fields that bridges the imagined space between sixteenth-century utopia and twenty-first century dystopia with analyses penetrating fictitious spaces beyond utopian and dystopian spheres. This volume argues, consequently, that the space of imagination that conjures up versions of the world's frustrations also offers a virtual battleground – and the possibility of triumph coming from a valuable gain of cognizance, once we perceive the correspondence between spaces of the fantastic and those of the mundane.
Author: Elizabeth Sauer Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135217920 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 483
Book Description
This volume contains primary materials and introductory essays on the historical, critical and theoretical study of "national literature", focusing on the years 1550 – 1850 and the impact of ideas of nationhood from this period on contemporary literature and culture. The book is helpfully divided into three comprehensive parts. Part One contains a selection of primary materials from various English-speaking nations, written between the early modern and the early Victorian eras. These include political essays, poetry, religious writing, and literary theory by major authors and thinkers ranging from Edmund Spenser, Anne Bradstreet and David Hume to Adam Kidd and Peter Du Ponceau. Parts Two and Three contain critical essays by leading scholars in the field: Part Two introduces and contextualizes the primary material and Part Three brings the discussion up-to-date by discussing its impact on contemporary issues such as canon-formation and globalization. The volume is prefaced by an extensive introduction to and overview of recent studies in nationalism, the history and debates of nationalism through major literary periods and discussion of why the question of nationhood is important. Reading the Nation in English is a comprehensive resource, offering coherent, accessible readings on the ideologies, discourses and practices of nationhood. Contributors: Terence N. Bowers, Andrea Cabajsky, Sarah Corse, Andrew Escobedo, Andrew Hadfield, Deborah Madsen, Elizabeth Sauer, Imre Szeman, Julia M. Wright.
Author: Jessica Winston Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0191082244 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 285
Book Description
Many early modern poets and playwrights were also members of the legal societies the Inns of Court, and these authors shaped the development of key genres of the English Renaissance, especially lyric poetry, dramatic tragedy, satire, and masque. But how did the Inns come to be literary centres in the first place, and why were they especially vibrant at particular times? Early modernists have long understood that urban setting and institutional environment were central to this phenomenon: in the vibrant world of London, educated men with time on their hands turned to literary pastimes for something to do. Lawyers at Play proposes an additional, more essential dynamic: the literary culture of the Inns intensified in decades of profound transformation in the legal profession. Focusing on the first decade of Elizabeth's reign, the period when a large literary network first developed around the societies, this study demonstrates that the literary surge at this time developed out of and responded to a period of rapid expansion in the legal profession and in the career prospects of members. Poetry, translation, and performance were recreational pastimes; however, these activities also defined and elevated the status of inns-of-court men as qualified, learned, and ethical participants in England's 'legal magistracy': those lawyers, judges, justices of the peace, civic office holders, town recorders, and gentleman landholders who managed and administered local and national governance of England. Lawyers at Play maps the literary terrain of a formative but understudied period in the English Renaissance, but it also provides the foundation for an argument that goes beyond the 1560s to provide a framework for understanding the connections between the literary and legal cultures of the Inns over the whole of the early modern period.
Author: Andrew Hadfield Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191655074 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 768
Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500-1640 is the only current overview of early modern English prose writing. The aim of the volume is to make prose more visible as a subject and as a mode of writing. It covers a vast range of material vital for the understanding of the period: from jestbooks, newsbooks, and popular romance to the translation of the classics and the pioneering collections of scientific writing and travel writing; from diaries, tracts on witchcraft, and domestic conduct books to rhetorical treatises designed for a courtly audience; from little known works such as William Baldwin's Beware the Cat, probably the first novel in English, to The Bible, The Book of Common Prayer and Richard Hooker's eloquent statement of Anglican belief, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The work not only deals with the range and variety of the substance and types of English prose, but also analyses the forms and styles of writing adopted in the early modern period, ranging from the Euphuistic nature of prose fiction inaugurated by John Lyly's mannered novel, to the aggressive polemic of the Marprelate controversy; from the scatological humour of comic writing to the careful modulations of the most significant sermons of the age; and from the pithy and concise English essays of Francis Bacon to the ornate and meandering style of John Florio's translation of Montaigne's famous collection. Each essay provides an overview as well as comment on key passages, and a select guide to further reading.
Author: Jessica S. Hower Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030628922 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 418
Book Description
This book recasts one of the most well-studied and popularly-beloved eras in history: the tumultuous span from the 1485 accession of Henry VII to the 1603 death of Elizabeth I. Though many have gravitated toward this period for its high drama and national importance, the book offers a new narrative by focusing on another facet of the British past that has exercised an equally powerful grip on audiences: imperialism. It argues that the sixteenth century was pivotal to the making of both Britain and the British Empire. Unearthing over a century of theorizing about and probing into the world beyond England’s borders, Tudor Empire shows that foreign enterprise at once mirrored, responded to, and provoked domestic politics and culture, while decisively shaping the Atlantic World. Demonstrating that territorial expansion abroad and national consolidation and identity formation at home were concurrent, intertwined, and mutually reinforcing, the author examines some of the earliest ventures undertaken by the crown and its subjects in France, Scotland, Ireland, and the Americas. Tudor Empire is a thought-provoking, essential read for those interested in the Tudors and the British Empire that they helped create.
Author: Helen Vella Bonavita Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317118928 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 325
Book Description
This study considers the figure of the bastard in the context of analogies of the family and the state in early modern England. The trope of illegitimacy, more than being simply a narrative or character-driven issue, is a vital component in the evolving construction and representation of British national identity in prose and drama of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Through close reading of a range of plays and prose texts, the book offers readers new insight into the semiotics of bastardy and concepts of national identity in early modern England, and reflects on contemporary issues of citizenship and identity. The author examines play texts of the period including Bale's King Johan, Peele's The Troublesome Reign of John, and Shakespeare's King John, Richard II, and King Lear in the context of a selection of legal, religious, and polemical texts. In so doing, she illuminates the extent to which the figure of the bastard and, more generally the trope of illegitimacy, existed as a distinct discourse within the wider discursive framework of family and nation.
Author: Cathy Shrank
Author: Mike Pincombe
Author: Kristen Poole
Author: Chloë Houston
Author: Ildikó Limpár
Author: Elizabeth Sauer
Author: Jessica Winston
Author: Andrew Hadfield
Author: Jessica S. Hower
Author: Helen Vella Bonavita