The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

Examining both familiar and underappreciated early modern texts, Hassan Melehy foregrounds the relationships that four writers - Joachim Du Bellay, Edmund Spenser, Michel de Montaigne, and William Shakespeare - conceived with both their classical and modern predecessors. Melehy sheds new light on pertinent issues in early modern studies, including translation, the relationship between classicism and writing in the vernacular, attitudes toward colonial expansion and the "New World," and definitions of modernity and the past.