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Why were sonnet sequences popular in Renaissance England? In this study, Christopher Warley suggests that sonneteers created a vocabulary to describe, and to invent, new forms of social distinction before an explicit language of social class existed. The tensions inherent in the genre - between lyric and narrative, between sonnet and sequence - offered writers a means of reconceptualizing the relation between individuals and society, a way to try to come to grips with the broad social transformations taking place at the end of the sixteenth century. By stressing the struggle over social classification, the book revises studies that have tied the influence of sonnet sequences to either courtly love or to Renaissance individualism. Drawing on Marxist aesthetic theory, it offers detailed examinations of sequences by Lok, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. It will be valuable to readers interested in Renaissance and genre studies, and post-Marxist theories of class.
This volume updates current assumptions about the early modern English sonnet and its reception and inclusion in poetic collections. It deals both with major (Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser) and minor (Harvey, Barnes) sonneteers, and includes the first modern edition of a 1603 printed miscellany, The Muses Garland.
This book provides readers with the tools to unravel the complexities of one of the most difficult sonnet sequences, introducing them to the literary tradition, themes, stylistic features and cultural contexts of the genre and the collection, and offering close readings of more than 100 sonnets. This combined approach enables readers not only to disentangle the complex relationships of the poems' characters but also to appreciate their philosophical, sensual, topical and subversive qualities. Of the book's two sections, the first, 'Contexts and Forms', includes chapters on the sonnet tradition, early publication history, the structural features of the sequence and the Shakespearean sonnet, as well as the main characteristics of the dramatis personae. The second section, 'Themes', consists of 5 chapters and explores the theme clusters that can be identified throughout the sequence (preservation, writing, desire, deception, imagination). Additional features of the book include a step-by-step approach to a Shakespeare sonnet, a model interpretation of a sonnet, as well as charts and tables identifying and summarizing the sequence's mini-narratives, groups, addressees and themes. For easy reference, the sonnets discussed in the book are cross-referenced and listed in the index, which also includes key terms and names of works and people. Suggestions for further reading are provided at the end of each chapter, and the annotated bibliography includes brief descriptions of the most useful works for further study.
Beginning with the early masters of the sonnet form, Dante and Petrarch, the Companion examines the reinvention of the sonnet across times and cultures, from Europe to America. In doing so, it considers sonnets as diverse as those by William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, George Herbert and e. e. cummings. The chapters explore how we think of the sonnet as a 'lyric' and what is involved in actually trying to write one. The book includes a lively discussion between three distinguished contemporary poets - Paul Muldoon, Jeff Hilson and Meg Tyler - on the experience of writing a sonnet, and a chapter which traces the sonnet's diffusion across manuscript, print, screen and the internet. A fresh and authoritative overview of this major poetic form, the Companion expertly guides the reader through the sonnet's history and development into the global multimedia phenomenon it is today.
Renaissance writers habitually drew upon the idioms and images of the schoolroom in their depictions of emotional experience. Memorable instances of this tendency include the representation of love as a schoolroom exercise conducted under the disciplinary gaze of the mistress, melancholy as a process of gradual decline like the declension of the noun, and courtship as a practice in which the participants are arranged like the parts of speech in a sentence. The Grammar Rules of Affection explores this synthesis of the affective and the pedagogical in Renaissance literature, analysing examples from major texts by Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. Drawing on philosophical approaches to emotion, theories of social practice, and the history of education, this book argues that emotions appear in Renaissance literature as conventional, rule-guided practices rather than internal states. This claim represents a novel intervention in the historical study of emotion, departing from the standard approaches to emotions as either corporeal phenomena or mental states. Combining linguistic philosophy and theory of emotion, The Grammar Rules of Affection works to overcome this dualistic crux by locating emotion in the expressions and practices of everyday life.
When poetry was printed, poets and their publishers could no longer take for granted that readers would have the necessary knowledge and skill to read it well. By making poems available to anyone who either had the means to a buy a book or knew someone who did, print publication radically expanded the early modern reading public. These new readers, publishers feared, might not buy or like the books. Worse, their misreadings could put the authors, the publishers, or the readers themselves at risk. Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England focuses on early modern publishers' efforts to identify and accommodate new readers of verse that had previously been restricted to particular social networks in manuscript. Focusing on the period between the maturing of the market for printed English literature in the 1590s and the emergence of the professional poet following the Restoration, this study shows that poetry was shaped by--and itself shaped--strong print publication traditions. By reading printed editions of poems by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and others, this book shows how publishers negotiated genre, gender, social access, reputation, literary knowledge, and the value of English literature itself. It uses literary, historical, bibliographical, and quantitative evidence to show how publishers' strategies changed over time. Ultimately, Doubtful Readers argues that although--or perhaps because--publishers' interpretive and editorial efforts are often elided in studies of early modern poetry, their interventions have had an enduring impact on our canons, texts, and literary histories.
Edmund Spenser's innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England's ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx's words, 'Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet'-- a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted. In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great - Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I and James VI? Why was he more at home with 'the middling sort' -- writers, publishers and printers, bureaucrats, soldiers, academics, secretaries, and clergymen -- than with the mighty and the powerful? How did the appalling slaughter he witnessed in Ireland impact on his imaginative powers? How did his marriage and family life shape his work? Spenser's brilliant writing has always challenged our preconceptions. So too, Hadfield shows, does the contradictory relationship between his between life and his art.
Writers of the English Renaissance, like their European contemporaries, frequently reflect on the phenomenon of exile—an experience that forces the individual to establish a new personal identity in an alien environment. Although there has been much commentary on this phenomenon as represented in English Renaissance literature, there has been nothing written at length about its counterpart, namely, internal exile: marginalization, or estrangement, within the homeland. This volume considers internal exile as a simultaneously twofold experience. It studies estrangement from one’s society and, correlatively, from one’s normative sense of self. In doing so, it focuses initially on the sonnet sequences by Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare (which is to say, the problematics of romance); then it examines the verse satires of Donne, Hall, and Marston (likewise, the problematics of anti-romance). This book argues that the authors of these major texts create mythologies—via the myths of (and accumulated mythographies about) Cupid, satyrs, and Proteus—through which to reflect on the doubleness of exile within one’s own community. These mythologies, at times accompanied by theologies, of alienation suggest that internal exile is a fluid and complex experience demanding multifarious reinterpretation of the incongruously expatriate self. The monograph thus establishes a new framework for understanding texts at once diverse yet central to the Elizabethan literary achievement.
Sidney's Defence of Poesy—the foundational text of English poetics—is generally taken to present a model of poetry as ideal: the poet depicts ideals of human conduct and readers are inspired to imitate them. Catherine Bates sets out to challenge this received view. Attending very closely to Sidney's text, she identifies within it a model of poetry that is markedly at variance from the one presumed, and shows Sidney's text to be feeling its way toward a quite different—indeed, a de-idealist—poetics. Following key theorists of the new economic criticism, On Not Defending Poetry shows how idealist poetics, like the idealist philosophy on which it draws, is complicit with the money form and with the specific ills that attend upon it: among them, commodification, fetishism, and the abuse of power. Against culturally approved models of poetry as profitable—as benefiting the individual and the state, as providing (in the form of intellectual, moral, and social capital) a quantifiable yield—the Defence reveals an unexpected counter-argument: one in which poetry is modelled, rather, as pure expenditure, a free gift, a net loss. Where a supposedly idealist Defence sits oddly with Sidney's literary writings—which depict human behaviour that is very far from ideal—a de-idealist Defence does not. In its radical reading of the Defence, this book thus makes a decisive intervention in the field of early modern studies, while raising larger questions about a culture determined to quantify the 'value' of the humanities and to defend the arts on those grounds alone.
The literature of the entire Tudor period, from the reign of Henry VII to death of Elizabeth I is covered by this volume. It pays particular attention to the years before 1580, covering the establishment of print culture and growth of a reading public.