Early Modern/Renaissance Literature

A remarkable resurgence of interest has taken place over recent years in a biographical approach to the work of early modern poets and dramatists, in particular to the plays and poems of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. The contributors to this volume approach the topic in a manner that is at once ..

This book offers a new and exciting view of Shakespeare's tragedies through a passionate and provocative argument for reclaiming shame...

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read these sources direct...

Despite his influence as a poet, wit, courtier, exile, politician and surveyor of the king's works, Sir John Denham remains a neglected figure. The original essays in this interdisciplinary collection both examine for the first time, and reassess, important features of Denham's life and reputations,..

Analyzing a variety of literature-including religious polemic, dialogue, pamphlets, sermons, and treatises-Melissa Caldwell argues that a skeptical mode of thinking is embedded in the literary and rhetorical choices made by English writers who straddle the project of reform and the maintenance of or..

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico analyzes a series of intellectual and cultural spheres in seventeenth-century Mexico-the library, anatomy and medicine, spirituality, education and classical learning, and publishing and printing-through the writings o..

In this book, Daniel Cadman examines the development of neo-Senecan drama, also known as ’closet drama’, during the years 1590-1613. In analyzing how these plays illuminate various aspects of early modern political culture, the book addresses gaps in the scholarship of early modern drama and explore..

Examining issues such as status and speech, ideas of literary and verbal decorum, readership and the history of reading, material books, and the history of speech and performance, Elspeth Jajdelska draws on anthropological findings to offer a new account of the changing relationship between speech a..

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. Pugh's reading presents a challenge to New Historicist assumptions, as she contests both t..

Exploring Spenser's work within the historical and aesthetic context of colonial agricultural reform in Ireland, this study demonstrates how Irish events operate in more of Spenser's poetry than previously suspected. It explores heretofore neglected Irish material in the work of Spenser's contempor..

Hillary M. Nunn here traces the connections between the London public's interest in medical dissection and the changing cultural significance of bloodshed on the early Stuart playhouse stage. Considering the playhouses' role within the social world of early modern London, Nunn explores the influence..

Hillary M. Nunn here traces the connections between the London public's interest in medical dissection and the changing cultural significance of bloodshed on the early Stuart playhouse stage. Considering the playhouses' role within the social world of early modern London, Nunn explores the influence..