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"Reading literary texts in their historical contexts has been the dominant form of interpretation in literary criticism for the past thirty years. This collection of essays reflects on the origins of historicism and its present usefulness as a mode of literary analysis, its limitations, and its future. The volume provides a brief history of the practice from its renaissance origins, offering examples of historicist work that not only demonstrate the continuing vitality of this methodology but also suggest new directions for research. Focusing on the major figures of Shakespeare and Milton, these essays provide important and concise representations of trends in the field. Designed for scholars and students of early modern English literature (1500-1700), the volume will also be of interest to students of literature more generally and to historians"--
This volume explores the history and practice of historicism and its present usefulness for literary criticism, its limitations and its future.
Shakespeare's History Plays boldly moves criticism of Shakespeare's history plays beyond anti-humanist theoretical approaches. This important intervention in the critical and theoretical discourse of Shakespeare studies summarises, evaluates and ultimately calls time on the mode of criticism that has prevailed in Shakespeare studies over the past thirty years. It heralds a new, more dynamic way of reading Shakespeare as a supremely intelligent and creative political thinker, whose history plays address and illuminate the very questions with which cultural historicists have been so preoccupied since the 1980s. In providing bold and original readings of the first and second tetralogies (Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II and Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2), the book reignites old debates and re-energises recent bids to humanise Shakespeare and to restore agency to the individual in the critical readings of his plays
The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism is a wide-ranging, authoritative guide to research on critical approaches to Shakespeare by an international team of leading scholars. It contains chapters on 20 specific critical practices, each grounded in analysis of a Shakespeare play. These practices range from foundational approaches including character studies, close reading and genre studies, through those that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s that challenged the preconceptions on which traditional liberal humanism is based, including feminism, cultural materialism and new historicism. Perspectives drawn from postcolonial, queer studies and critical race studies, besides more recent critical practices including presentism, ecofeminism and cognitive ethology all receive detailed treatment. In addition to its coverage of distinct critical approaches, the handbook contains various sections that provide non-specialists with practical help: an A–Z glossary of key terms and concepts, a chronology of major publications and events, an introduction to resources for study of the field and a substantial annotated bibliography.
This collection reconsiders Milton’s engagement with Greek texts, with particular attention to the theological and theatrical meanings attached to Greek in the early modern period. Responding to new scholarship on early modern reactions to Greek authors – especially Euripides and Homer, Milton’s particular favourites – the collection emphasizes the associations of Greek with both Protestantism and the origins of tragedy, two arenas frequently in tension, but crucially linked in Milton’s literary imagination. The contributions explore a range of works spanning the whole of Milton’s career, from the early masque Comus, through the political and religious prose, to the 1671 closet drama, Samson Agonistes. They consider the ways in which the authority and controversy attached to Greek authors framed Milton’s approaches to their texts. Looking at both the texts and their interpretative traditions together, this book suggests that Greek authors shaped Milton’s attitudes to drama in ways even more extensive and surprising than we have yet recognized. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Seventeenth Century.
Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England examines the emotional effect of stage performance on the minds of the early modern theatre audience.
Milton criticism often treats the poet as if he were the last of the Renaissance poets or a visionary prophet who remained misunderstood until he was read by the Romantics. At the same time, literary histories of the period often invoke a Long Eighteenth Century that reaches its climax with the French Revolution or the Reform Bill of 1832. What gets overlooked in such accounts is the rich story of Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early eighteenth-century heirs. The essays in this collection demonstrate that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than Romantic and twentieth-century interpreters. The translations, editions, and commentaries produced by early eighteenth century men of letters emerge as the seedbed of modern criticism and the term 'neoclassical' is itself unmasked as an inadequate characterization of the literary criticism and poetry of the period—a period that could brilliantly define a Miltonic sublime, even as it supported and described all the varieties of parody and domestication found in the mock epic and the novel. These essays, which are written by a team of leading Miltonists and scholars of the Restoration and eighteenth century, cover a range of topics—from Milton's early editors and translators to his first theatrical producers; from Miltonic similes in Pope's Iliad to Miltonic echoes in Austen's Pride and Prejudice; from marriage, to slavery, to republicanism, to the heresy of Arianism. What they share in common is a conviction that the early eighteenth century understood Milton and that the Long Restoration cannot be understood without him.
The first volume to consider how the context of early modern biblical interpretation shaped Shakespeare's plays.
In Untold Futures, J. K. Barret locates models for recovering the variety of futures imagined within some of our most foundational literature. These poems, plays, and prose fictions reveal how Renaissance writers embraced uncertain potential to think about their own present moment and their own place in time. The history of the future that Barret reconstructs looks beyond futures implicitly dismissed as impossible or aftertimes defined by inevitability and fixed perspective. Chapters on Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost trace instead a persistent interest in an indeterminate, earthly future evident in literary constructions that foreground anticipation and expectation. Barret argues that the temporal perspectives embedded in these literary texts unsettle some of our most familiar points of reference for the period by highlighting an emerging cultural self-consciousness capable of registering earthly futures predicated on the continued sameness of time rather than radical ruptures in it. Rather than mapping a particular future, these writers generate imaginative access to a range of futures. Barret makes a strong case for the role of language itself in emerging conceptualizations of temporality.
By bringing together Milton specialists with other innovative early modern scholars, the collection aims to embrace and encourage a methodologically adventurous study of Milton's works, analyzing them both in relation to their own moment and their many ensuing contexts.