A Companion to English renaissance literature and culture

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This is a one volume, up-to-date collection of more than fifty wide-ranging essays which will inspire and guide students of the Renaissance and provide course leaders with a substantial and helpful frame of reference.

Provides new perspectives on established texts. Orientates the new student, while providing advanced students with current and new directions. Pioneered by leading scholars. Occupies a unique niche in Renaissance studies. Illustrated with 12 single-page black and white prints.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Part I Introduction
• 1 Introduction
• Part II Contexts and Perspectives ca 1500-1650
• 2 Early Tudor 'Humanism
• 3 English Reformations
• 4 Platonism, Stoicism, Scepticism, and Classical Imitation
• 5 History
• 6 The English Language of the Early Modern Period
• 7 Publication: Print and Manuscript
• 8 Literacy and Education
• 9 Court and Coterie Culture
• 10 The Literature of the Metropolis
• 11 Playhouses and the Role of Drama
• 12 The Writing of Travel
• Part III Readings
• 13 Translations of the Bible
• 14 Wyatt's 'Who So List to Hunt'
• 15 Courtship and Counsell: John Lyly's Campaspe
• 16 Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book V: Poetry, Politics, and Justicem
• 17 Kyd's Spanish Tragedy
• 18 Donne's 19th Elergy
• 19 Lanyer's 'The Description of Cookham' and Jonson's 'To Penshurst'
• 20 A Bacon Essay ('Of Simulation and Dissimulation')
• 21 Lancelot Andrewes Good Friday 1604 Sermon
• 22 Herbert's 'The Elixir'
• 23 The Heart of the Labyrinth: Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
• 24 The Critical Elegy
• 25 The final scene of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore
• Part IV Genres and Modes
• 26 Theories of Literary Kinds
• 27 Allegory
• 28 Pastoral
• 29 Romance
• 30 Epic
• 31 Criticism
• 32 The English Print c.1550-c.1650
• Verse
• 33 Traditions of Complaint and Satire
• 34 Love Poetry
• 35 Erotic Poems
• 36 Religious Verse
• 37 Poets, Friends and Patrons: Donne and his Circle; Ben and his Tribe
• 38 'Such Pretty Things Would Soon be Gone': The Neglected Genres of Popular Verse 1480-1650
• Drama
• 39 Local and "Customary" Drama
• 40 Continuities between 'Medieval' and 'Early Modern' Drama
• 41 Heroic, Political, and Problem Plays
• 42 Women and Drama
• 43 Tales of the City: The Comedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton
• 44 'Tied/To Rules of Flattery?': Court Drama and the Masque
• 45 Jacobean Tragedy
• 46 Caroline Theatre
• Prose
• 47 Scientific Writing
• 48 Prose Fiction
• 49 Theological Writings and Religious Polemic
• 50 The English Renaissance Essay: Churchyard, Cornwallis, Florio's Montaigne, and Bacon
• 51 Diaries
• 52 Letters
• Part V Issues and Debates
• 53 Rhetoric
• 54 Identity
• 55 Was There a Renaissance Feminism
• 56 The Debate on Witchcraft
• 57 Reconstructing the Past: History, Historicism, Histories
• 58 Sexuality: A Renaissance Category
• 59 Race: A Renaissance Category
• 60 Writing the Nation

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The 60 original essays in this volume (by 51 established scholars) provide a remarkably comprehensive overview of current understanding of the literature and culture of the English Renaissance. Hattaway (Univ. of Sheffield, UK) divides the essays into four sections. The first explores influential cultural forces such as humanism, reformation, classical learning, publishing, court culture, language, the development of playhouses, and travel writing. The next section includes new readings of works by Wyatt, Lyly, Spenser, Kyd, Donne, Lanyer, Bacon, Andrewes, Herbert, Ford, and Wroth. The third section, containing nearly half of the essays, explores genre, ranging from canonical genres such as allegory, pastoral, romance, and epic to prints, popular poetry, traditional local drama, diaries, and letters. The final section explores the Renaissance understandings of such things as rhetoric, identity, witchcraft, feminism, sexuality, and race. The discussions are uniformly well balanced, accessible, and insightful. The individual bibliographies provide lists of works for further reading, and the volume is unified by a comprehensive index. The target audience of upper-division undergraduates and graduate students will be very well served by this anthology, and because of its breadth and new readings, faculty will find rewards as well. Highly recommended. B. E. Brandt South Dakota State University