Download or read book Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction written by Walter R. Davis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Represents an attempt to apply the techniques of modern literary criticism to the fiction of the Elizabethan period. The author tries "to determine what Elizabethan fiction writers were trying to do and how they did it." Originally published in 1969. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction written by Reid Barbour and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From 1570 to 1630 prose fiction was an upstart in English culture, still defined in relation to poetry and drama yet invested with its own considerable power and potential. In these years, a community of writers arrived on the scene in London and strove to make a name for themselves largely from the prose that they produced at an astonishing rate. Modern scholars of the Renaissance have attempted to measure this prose against such standards as humanist culture or the emerging novel. But the prose fiction written by Lyly, Greene, and their imitators has eluded modern readers even more than the works of Shakespeare and Spenser. In Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction, Reid Barbour studies three interwoven case histories - those of Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Dekker - and explores their favorite tropes and figures. In response to one another, these three writers attempt to define, liberate, and question the boundaries of prose. That is, they want to secure for prose a new and powerful status in an age when its parameters are unclear and its rivals still valorized but its parameters unbounded. Barbour argues that Nashe absorbs but also rejects the agendas of Greene's prose, offering alternative tropes in their place. Dekker parodies Nashe but unsettles any scheme for stabilizing prose, including those set forth by Nashe himself." "This work centers on three terms that Greene, Nashe, and Dekker obviously could not get off their minds: decipher, discover, and stuff. The first two terms, pervasive in Greene, make specific and complex demands on narrative and its readers. With stuff however, Nashe and Dekker cultivate an extemporal and a material prose, and challenge the fictions that decipher and discover, from romance to roguery. These key words not only situate prose in regard to poetry, drama, and the world; they also raise crucial Renaissance questions about order and duty, faith and doubt. Accordingly, their frame of reference extends from Renaissance poetics and narratology to a nascent Epicureanism and neoskepticism. In an about-face, prose becomes the standard by which the rest of Elizabethan and early Stuart culture is measured, even as prose is constituted by that culture." "With three of the most popular English Renaissance writers as his focus, Barbour reassesses the question of how (or whether) Elizabethan fiction is an ancestor of the novel. Students of the novel have recently intensified their search for the origins of Defoe, Dickens, and Woolf. But Elizabethan prose fiction challenges the novel rather than founds it. In its conclusion, then, Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction considers responses to Elizabethan prose, from Behn to Joyce."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse written by Robert Weimann and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This path-breaking study attempts to view both Reformation discourse and Renaissance fiction (and, by implication, the Elizabethan theater) as constitutive of an early modern paradigm change in the authorization of discourse. The profound crisis in traditional locations of authority, affecting religious, political, and poetic courts of appeal, is traced as interactive with an unprecedented proliferation of both signifying practices and communicative technologies. Representation itself seeks to cope with these changing uses of language and power vis- -vis deep divisions (but also new patterns of socialization) in contemporary culture and society. Authority, now that it is less given before an utterance begins, comes to constitute itself through the competence, cogency, and efficacy of representational practice itself, even as this practice privileges, and draws upon, pictorial form in diverse cultural contexts. This book continues to search for answers to questions of why and under what conditions in the early modern period the representation of authority could increasingly be challenged by the authority of signs. Initially raised in Weimann's Shakespeare und die Macht der Mimesis, these questions are developed towards a theory and history of early modern representation that involves close encounters with a wide variety of texts, from Luther, Henry Tudor, Edward Seymour, Gardiner, and Bancroft to Malory, Erasmus, Rabelais, Sidney, Nashe, and Cervantes. "Robert Weimann is one of the world's most eminent and intellectually formidable scholars of early modern culture -- and he has written a work of the utmost importance to the theory and practice of cultural and literary history, and to the study of sixteenth century English and European culture in particular. The book is an intellectual tour de force, yet one utterly devoid of the flourishes of academic self-display. This work genuinely impresses without ever seeking to impress." -- Louis A. Montrose, University of California, San Diego
Download or read book Romance for Sale in Early Modern England written by Steve Mentz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The major claim made by this study is that early modern English prose fiction self-consciously invented a new form of literary culture in which professional writers created books to be printed and sold to anonymous readers. It further claims that this period's narrative innovations emerged not solely from changes in early modern culture like print and the book market, but also from the rediscovery of a forgotten late classical text from North Africa, Heliodorus's Aethiopian History. In making these claims, Steve Mentz provides a comprehensive historicist and formalist account of prose romance, the most important genre of Elizabethan fiction. He explores how authors and publishers of prose fiction in late sixteenth-century England produced books that combined traditional narrative forms with a dynamic new understanding of the relationship between text and audience. Though prose fiction would not dominate English literary culture until the eighteenth century, Mentz demonstrates that the form began to invent itself as a distinct literary kind in England nearly two centuries earlier. Examining the divergent but interlocking careers of Robert Greene, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Nashe, Mentz traces how through differing commitments to print culture and their respective engagements with Heliodoran romance, these authors helped make the genre of prose fiction culturally and economically viable in England. Mentz explores how the advent of print and the book market changed literary discourse, influencing new conceptions of what he calls 'middlebrow' narrative and new habits of reading and writing. This study draws together three important strains of current scholarly inquiry: the history of the book and print culture, the study of popular fiction, and the re-examination of genre and influence. It also connects early modern fiction with longer histories of prose fiction and the rise of the modern novel.
Download or read book The Origins of the English Novel 1600 1740 written by Michael McKeon and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2003-05-13 with total page 822 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This may well be the most important study of the development of prose fiction in England since Ian Watt’s classic Rise of the Novel, on which it builds.” —Library Journal The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, combines historical analysis and readings of extraordinarily diverse texts to reconceive the foundations of the dominant genre of the modern era. Now, on the fifteenth anniversary of its initial publication, The Origins of the English Novel stands as essential reading. The anniversary edition features a new introduction in which the author reflects on the considerable response and commentary the book has attracted since its publication by describing dialectical method and by applying it to early modern notions of gender. Challenging prevailing theories that tie the origins of the novel to the ascendancy of “realism” and the “middle class,” McKeon argues that this new genre arose in response to the profound instability of literary and social categories. Between 1600 and 1740, momentous changes took place in European attitudes toward truth in narrative and toward virtue in the individual and the social order. The novel emerged, McKeon contends, as a cultural instrument designed to engage the epistemological and social crises of the age. “This book is a formidable attempt to articulate issues of almost imponderable centrality for modern life and literature. McKeon proposes with quite breathtaking ambition and considerable intellectual flourish to redefine the novel’s key role in those immense cultural transformations that produce the modern world.” —Studies in the Novel “A magisterial work of history and analysis.” —Arts and Letters “A powerful and solid work that will dominate discussion of its subject for a long time to come.” —The New York Review of Books
Download or read book Body Language in Literature written by Barbara Korte and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important interdisciplinary study, that establishes a general theory that accounts for the varieties of body language encountered in literary narrative, based on a general history of the phenomenon in the English language.
Download or read book English Prose of the Seventeenth Century 1590 1700 written by Roger Pooley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-06 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length history of the range of seventeenth-century English prose writing. Roger Pooley's study begins with narrative, ranging from the fiction of Bunyan and Aphra Behn to the biographical and autobiographical work of Aubrey and Pepys. Further sections consider religious prose from the hugely influential Authorised Version to Donne's sermons, the political writing of figures as diverse as Milton, Hobbes, Locke and Marvell, cornucopian texts and the writings of the new scientists from Bacon to Newton. At a time when the boundaries of the `canon' are being increasingly revised, this is not only a major survey of a series of great works of literature, but also a fascinating social history and a guide to understanding the literature of the period as a whole.
Download or read book The Rhetoric of Concealment written by Rosemary Kegl and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrating how struggles over gender and class were mediated through formal properties of writing, The Rhetoric of Concealment offers a new framework for the discussion of court literature and middle-class literature in the English Renaissance. Rosemary Kegl offers powerful readings of works by Puttenham, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Deloney and considers an array of other texts including journals, gynecological and obstetrical writings, misogynist tracts, defenses of women, prescriptive literature on companionate marriage, royal proclamations, legal records, and town charters.
Download or read book Telling the Truth written by Barbara C. Foley and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbara Foley here focuses on the relatively neglected genre of documentary fiction: novels that are continually near the borderline between factual and fictive discourse. She links the development of the genre over three centuries to the evolution of capitalism, but her analyses of literary texts depart significantly from those of most current Marxist critics. Foley maintains that Marxist theory has yet to produce a satisfactory theory of mimesis or of the development of genres, and she addresses such key issues as the problem of reference and the nature of generic distinctions. Among the authors whom Foley treats are Defoe, Scott, George Eliot, Joyce, Isherwood, Dos Passos, William Wells Brown, Ishmael Reed, and Ernest Gaines.
Download or read book Medievalism in England II written by Leslie J. Workman and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 1996 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve essays discuss how the middle ages are reflected in English culture from the sixteenth century to the present day.
Download or read book Reader s Guide to Literature in English written by Mark Hawkins-Dady and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 1024 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.
Download or read book Thomas Lodge Rosalynd written by Brian Nellist and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book on Thomas Lodge's Rosalynd.
Download or read book Literature Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance 1545 1625 written by Andrew Hadfield and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1998-12-17 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was the purpose of representing foreign lands for writers in the English Renaissance? This innovative and wide-ranging study argues that writers often used their works as vehicles to reflect on the state of contemporary English politics, particularly their own lack of representation in public institutions. Sometimes such analyses took the form of displaced allegories, whereby writers contrasted the advantages enjoyed, or disadvantages suffered, by foreign subjects with the political conditions of Tudor and Stuart England. Elsewhere, more often in explicitly colonial writings, authors meditated on the problems of government when faced with the possibly violent creation of a new society. If Venice was commonly held up as a beacon of republican liberty which England would do well to imitate, the fear of tyrannical Catholic Spain was ever present - inspiring and haunting much of the colonial literature from 1580 onwards. This stimulating book examines fictional and non-fictional writings, illustrating both the close connections between the two made by early modern readers and the problems involved in the usual assumption that we can make sense of the past with the categories available to us. Hadfield explores in his work representations of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Far East, selecting pertinent examples rather than attempting to embrace a total coverage. He also offers fresh readings of Shakespeare, Marlowe, More, Lyly, Hakluyt, Harriot, Nashe, and others.
Download or read book Tudor England written by Arthur F. Kinney and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2000-11-17 with total page 1747 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first encyclopedia to be devoted entirely to Tudor England. 700 entries by top scholars in every major field combine new modes of archival research with a detailed Tudor chronology and appendix of biographical essays.Entries include: * Edward Alleyn [actor/theatre manager] * Roger Ascham * Bible translation * cloth trade * Devereux fami
Download or read book The Gentle Craft written by Thomas Deloney and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume Simon Barker offers Deloney's tale in modern typography, with explanatory notes and an extensive introduction, a detailed account of the sources and influence of the book, its publication history, and what is known of its author. He suggests that Deloney's combination of romance with the practical morality of an emerging social class produced a text that is uniquely important for those interested in late-Elizabethan popular culture.
Download or read book The Novel in Antiquity written by Tomas Hägg and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1991-12-16 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the development of Greek romances from 200 B.C. through twelfth-century Byzantium, Tomas Hägg analyses the content, plot and narrative techniques of the ancient novel, and explores the social and literary milieu in which the genre flourished.
Download or read book Fashioning Authority written by Constance Caroline Relihan and published by Kent State University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Various factors in late 16th-century England contributed to an environment more hospitable to prose fiction than had existed previously-among them, changes in educational opportunities, socioeconomic structures, literacy rates, and access to European literature. Such cultural alterations inevitably produced changes in modes of literary production. Furthermore, access to the bookstall to a new class of readers altered the structures and subjects writers employed. Within this tumultuous context, the writers of fictional prose narrative negotiated-for themselves and their audience a precarious definition of their identity within the Elizabethan literary world. In Fashioning Authority Constance C. Relihan examines the influence of Elizabethan prose fiction on early modern literary culture, emphasizing the role of the nonaristocratic reader in the reception of literature, the importance of the marketplace in the production and reception of prose texts, and the growth of prose as the dominant mode of narrative presentation. Combining cultural analysis with a concern for narrative structure, Relihan explores six strategies by which the writers and readers of Elizabethan fiction struggled to achieve artistic authority: incorporating poetry into prose texts; using translated material; separating authorial from narrative voice; introducing a sense of place; depicting females; and representing non-European cultures. Relihan argues that Elizabethan fiction's unique position on the borders of literate and literary English culture, that is, its position as what M. M. Bakhtin calls "novelistic discourse," allows it to constitute a rich field for examining the ideological rifts of the period. Taking her primary examples from Barnabe Riche's Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581), but also considering texts by a variety of authors (such as Sidney, Deloney, Lyly, Gascoigne, Lodge, Breton, Greene, Harmon, Nashe, and Painter), Relihan demonstrates that regardless of their specific structural and thematic differences, the various modes of Elizabethan fiction all share a common origin in the upheavals of English culture during the later half of the 16th century. By examining novelistic discourse as a category, Fashioning Authority strengthens our understanding of the nature and history of English fiction even as it broadens our sense of Elizabethan culture. The result is an exploration of how Elizabethan novelistic discourse established the cultural place of its newly literate readers and its generically marginal authors, creating literary comfort in narrative prose for those who failed to find it in verse.
