Download or read book Spenser s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition written by John N. King and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this extended treatment of Edmund Spenser's place in the Reformation literary tradition, John King presents the poet as a rival of classical and Italianate literary predecessors by placing his work within a distinctively English context. Rather than follow those contemporaries who rejected the unpretentious devices of mid-Tudor satire and allegory, Spenser, it is shown, infuses them with sophisticated standards of the Continental Renaissance. King's study begins with the consideration of Spenser's debut as an innovator who, paradoxically, emulates "Chaucerian" precedent for pastoral satire. By revising critical opinions that identify an iconoclastic movement in The Faerie Queene, he demonstrates the constructive aspect of the Reformation attack against idolatry that underlies the pervasive inversion and mutation of iconic tableaux in the poem. This study culminates in a detailed reading of Book I of The Faerie Queene that addresses Spenser's reformation, within the all-inclusive frame of allegorical romantic epic, of deficient and worldly forms of romance, pastoral, and tragedy into a set of purged and elevated Christian counterparts.
Download or read book Ruin and Reformation in Spenser Shakespeare and Marvell written by Stewart Mottram and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruin and Reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell explores writerly responses to the religious violence of the long reformation in England and Wales, spanning over a century of literature and history, from the establishment of the national church under Henry VIII (1534), to its disestablishment under Oliver Cromwell (1653). It focuses on representations of ruined churches, monasteries, and cathedrals in the works of a range of English Protestant writers, including Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, Denham, and Marvell, reading literature alongside episodes in English reformation history: from the dissolution of the monasteries and the destruction of church icons and images, to the puritan reforms of the 1640s. The study departs from previous responses to literature's 'bare ruined choirs', which tend to read writerly ambivalence towards the dissolution of the monasteries as evidence of traditionalist, catholic, or Laudian nostalgia for the pre-reformation church. Instead, Ruin and Reformation shows how English protestants of all varieties—from Laudians to Presbyterians—could, and did, feel ambivalence towards, and anxiety about, the violence that accompanied the dissolution of the monasteries and other acts of protestant reform. The study therefore demonstrates that writerly misgivings about ruin and reformation need not necessarily signal an author's opposition to England's reformation project. In so doing, Ruin and Reformation makes an important contribution to cross-disciplinary debates about the character of English Protestantism in its formative century, revealing that doubts about religious destruction were as much a part of the experience of English protestantism as expressions of popular support for iconoclasm in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Download or read book Interpretation and Theology in Spenser written by Darryl J. Gless and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-10-27 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the ways in which new interpretations of theological doctrine inform Spenser's poetry.
Download or read book Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism written by Kenneth Borris and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book defines Platonism's roles in early modern theories of literature, and then reappraises the major Platonizing poet Edmund Spenser
Download or read book Spenser and Ovid written by Syrithe Pugh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Spenser and Ovid, Syrithe Pugh gives the first sustained account of Ovid's presence in the Spenser canon, uncovering new evidence to reveal the thematic and formal debts many of Spenser's poems owe to Ovid, particularly when considered in the light of an informed understanding of all of Ovid's work. Pugh's reading presents a challenge to New Historicist assumptions, as she contests both the traditional insistence on Virgil as Spenser's prime classical model and the idea it has perpetuated of Spenser as Elizabeth I's imperial propagandist. In fact, Pugh locates Ovid's importance to Spenser precisely in his counter-Virgilian world view, with its high valuation of faithful love, concern for individual freedom, distrust of imperial rule, and the poet's claim to vatic authority in opposition to political power. Her study spans Spenser's career from the inaugural Shepheardes Calender to what was probably his last poem, The Mutabilitie Cantos, and embraces his work in the genres of pastoral, love poetry, and epic romance.
Download or read book The Popular Culture of Shakespeare Spenser and Jonson written by Mary Ellen Lamb and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By analyzing appropriations of fairies, old wives, and mummers, this project explores the conflicted entanglements of early moderns leaving, or attempting to leave, a once-shared common culture behind.
Download or read book The Politics of Melancholy from Spenser to Milton written by Adam Kitzes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the so-called Age of Melancholy, many writers invoked both traditional and new conceptualizations of the disease in order to account for various types of social turbulence, ranging from discontent and factionalism to civil war. Writing about melancholy became a way to explore both the causes and preventions of political disorder, on both specific and abstract levels. Thus, at one and the same moment, a writer could write about melancholy to discuss specific and ongoing political crises and to explore more generally the principles which generate political conflicts in the first place. In the course of developing a traditional discourse of melancholy of its own, English writers appropriated representations of the disease - often ineffectively - in order to account for the political turbulence during the civil war and Interregnum periods
Download or read book Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England written by Aaron Kitch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crossing the disciplinary borders between political, religious, and economic history, Aaron Kitch's innovative new study demonstrates how sixteenth-century treatises and debates about trade influenced early modern English literature by shaping key formal and aesthetic concerns of authors between 1580 and 1630. The author's analysis concentrates on a commonly overlooked period of economic history-the English commercial revolution before 1620-and, utilizing an impressive combination of archival research, close reading, and attention to historical detail, traces the transformation of genre in both neglected and canonical texts. The topics here are wide-ranging but are presented with a commitment to providing a concrete understanding of the religious, political, and historic context in literary thought. Kitch begins with the emerging wool trade and explosion of economic writing, Spenser's glorification of commerce and the Protestant state as presented in The Faerie Queene, and writers such as Thomas Nashe who drew on the same economic principles to challenge Spenser. Other topics include the reaction to the herring trade in prose satire and pamphlets, the presentation of Jewish trading nations in Shakespeare and Marlowe, and the tension between the crown and London merchants as reflected in Middleton's city comedies and Jonson's and Munday's pageants and court masques.
Download or read book Edmund Spenser s The Faerie Queene written by Andrew Zurcher and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-16 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces a Renaissance masterpiece to a modern audience.
Download or read book Edmund Spenser written by Andrew Hadfield and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The first biography in sixty years of the most important non-dramatic poet of the English Renaissance"--From publisher description.
Download or read book Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse written by E. Heale and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-12-13 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The advent of relatively cheap editions in the mid-sixteenth century produced an explosion of verse, much of which represented the first person speaker as a version of the author. This book examines ways in which writers, often seeking advancement in their careers, harnessed verse for self-promotional purposes. Texts studied include a manuscript autobiography by Thomas Whythorne, printed verse by a woman, Isabella Whitney, travel and war narratives, as well as canonical texts by Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare.
Download or read book The Limits of Moralizing written by David Mikics and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book argues that critical tradition has obscured the mutually constitutive relation between the didactic mission of Renaissance epic and the pathos of the epic self." "Critics usually see Spenser and Milton either as poets dedicated to an autonomous aesthetic that dictates indulgence in pathos for its own sake, or as Christian moralists who subordinate pathos to the didactic demands of society. The Romantic tradition that stretches from Keats to Harold Bloom exemplifies the former option. Neo-Christian, reader response, and new historicist critics assert a contrary, but similarly unbalanced, view by choosing the didactic authority of social custom, tradition, or ideology over the pathos of subjectivity." "Resisting attempts to establish an absolute priority for either pathos or moralizing, David Mikics looks to the debate between subjective passions and didactic imperatives as a sign of the complex relation between literary creation and social norms. In a study that shies away from new historicist endorsements of the force of normative ideology, as well as late Romantic celebrations of the poetic self, the author finds that Spenser and Milton develop an innovative literary subjectivity under the pressure of the Reformation's moralizing aims." "Incorporating moral force within pathos would allow poetic passion to become a worthy and clearly justifiable public stance. But Spenser and Milton, in their pursuit of this rhetorical ideal, find themselves acknowledging, instead, an enduring disjunction between affect and the discursive forms of public morality which aim to discipline or exploit it."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Renaissance Literature and Linguistic Creativity written by James Harmer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renaissance Literature and Linguistic Creativity interrogates notions of linguistic creativity as presented in English literary texts of the late sixteenth century. It considers the reflections of Renaissance English writers upon the problem of how linguistic meaning is created in their work. The book achieves this consideration by placing its Renaissance authors in the context of the dominant conceptualisation of the thought-language relationship in the Western tradition: namely, that of 'introspection'. In taking this route, author James Harmer undertakes to provide a comprehensive overview of the notion of 'introspection' from classical times to the Renaissance, and demonstrates how complex and even strange this notion is often seen to be by thinkers and writers. Harmer also shows how poetry and literary discourse in general stands at the centre of the conceptual consideration of what linguistic thinking is. He then argues, through a range of close readings of Renaissance texts, that writers of the Shakespearean period increase the fragility of the notion of 'introspection' in such a way as to make the prospect of any systematic theory of meaning seem extremely remote. Embracing and exploring the possibility that thinking about meaning can only occur in the context of extreme cognitive and psychological limitation, these texts emerge as proponents of a human mind which is remarkably free in its linguistic nature; an irresistible mode of life unto itself. The final argumentative stratum of the book explores the implications of this approach for understanding the relationship between literary criticism, philosophy, and other kinds of critical activity. Texts discussed at length include Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and shorter poetry, George Chapman's Ovids Banquet of Sence, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, and John Donne's Elegies.
Download or read book Edmund Spenser written by Jennifer Klein Morrison and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though his writings have long been integral to the canon of early modern English literature, it is only in very recent scholarship that Edmund Spenser has been understood as a preeminent anthropologist whose work develops a complex theory of cultural change. The contributors to this volume approach Spenser’s work from that new perspective, rethinking his contribution as a theorist of culture in light of his poetics. The essays in the collection begin with close readings of Spenser’s writings and end by challenging the ethnographic allegories that shape our knowledge of early modern England. In this book Spenser is proven to be not only a powerful theorist of allegory and poetics but also a profound and subtle ethnographer of England and Ireland. This is an interdisciplinary volume, incorporating studies on history and art history as well as literary criticism. The essays are based on papers presented at The Faerie Queen in the World, 1596-1996: Edmund Spenser among the Disciplines , a conference which took place at the Yale Center for British Art in September 1996.
Download or read book The Shakespearean International Yearbook written by Professor Graham Bradshaw and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-04-28 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this issue of The Shakespearean International Yearbook, the special section surveys various means of 'Updating Shakespeare'. The section treats a variety of attempts and strategies, including by artists in Japan, China and Brazil, to adapt Shakespeare's works into local and present circumstances. The guest editor for the section is Tetsuo Kishi, Professor Emeritus in English at the University of Kyoto, co-author of Shakespeare in Japan (2006). The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Poland, Japan and Brazil. In addition to the section on 'Updating', essays in this volume treat Shakespeare's poems, his narrative strategies, his relation to ideas such as tolerance and representation, and the afterlives of his work in writers such as Gay, Slowacki and Becket, and in theatrical relics.
Download or read book The early Spenser 1554 80 written by Jean R. Brink and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brink’s provocative biography shows that Spenser was not the would-be court poet whom Karl Marx’s described as ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet’. In this readable and informative account, Spenser is depicted as the protégé of a circle of London clergymen, who expected him to take holy orders. Brink shows that the young Spenser was known to Alexander Nowell, author of Nowell’s Catechism and Dean of St. Paul’s. Significantly revising the received biography, Brink argues that that it was Harvey alone who orchestrated Familiar Letters (1580). He used this correspondence to further his career and invented the portrait of Spenser as his admiring disciple. Contextualising Spenser’s life by comparisons with Shakespeare and Sir Walter Ralegh, Brink shows that Spenser shared with Sir Philip Sidney an allegiance to the early modern chivalric code. His departure for Ireland was a high point, not an exile.
Download or read book Spenser s Heavenly Elizabeth written by Donald Stump and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-07 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reveals the queen behind Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Placing Spenser’s epic poem in the context of the tumultuous sixteenth century, Donald Stump offers a groundbreaking reading of the poem as an allegory of Elizabeth I’s life. By narrating the loves and wars of an Arthurian realm that mirrors Elizabethan England, Spenser explores the crises that shaped Elizabeth’s reign: her break with the pope to create a reformed English Church, her standoff with Mary, Queen of Scots, offensives against Irish rebels and Spanish troops, confrontations with assassins and foreign invaders, and the apocalyptic expectations of the English people in a time of national transformation. Brilliantly reconciling moral and historicist readings, this volume offers a major new interpretation of The Faerie Queene.
