Renaissance Pastoral And Its English Developments

This book, the first critical history of English Renaissance pastoral since 1906, combines factual history with critical analyses of major authors and areas, including several continental pastoralists and Renaissance readings of Virgil's Eclogues. It explores the extent, variety, and complexity of Renaissance pastoral and the forces that helped shape it, discusses language and literary convention, and examines the political and topical implications of pastoral as well as significant details of publication and patronage.

The figure of the woman as hero in pastoral romance is shown to grow in importance and complexity in this important new study. The genre of pastoral romance flourished dramatically in Renaissance England between 1590 and 1650. One of its key elements is that it is the daughter, not the son, of the gentle family who increasingly becomes the subject of theromance's attempt to define and illustrate heroism. The pastoral heroine's task is paradoxical: to break out of her pastoral paradise in order to ensure its reconstitution. She is the princess, the shepherdess, the Lady, or the virtuous daughter who becomes a repository of honor and virtue in a changing society where traditional chivalric definitions of honor hold decreasing purchase. This groundbreaking book examines the typical challenges facedby the pastoral romance heroine as she matures within the pastoral locus amoenus: the foundling dilemma; the loop-shaped quest: the rhetorical battle; the chastity threat; the reconciliation of beauty to virtue; and familial reunification. It illustrates how the allegorical, symbolic, and psychological characterizations of pastoral heroines in the works of Sidney, Spenser, Wroth, Fletcher, Milton, and Marvell anticipate developments in the representation of female subjectivities normally associated with the novel. SUE P. STARKE is Associate Professor of English at Monmouth University, New Jersey.

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.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This second volume, and third to appear in the series, covers the years 1558-1660, and explores the reception of the ancient genres and authors in English Renaissance literature, engaging with the major, and many of the minor, writers of the period, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Jonson. Separate chapters examine the Renaissance institutions and contexts which shape the reception of antiquity, and an annotated bibliography provides substantial material for further reading.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This second volume, and third to appear in the series, covers the years 1558-1660, and explores the reception of the ancient genres and authors in English Renaissance literature, engaging with the major, and many of the minor, writers of the period, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Jonson. Separate chapters examine the Renaissance institutions and contexts which shape the reception of antiquity, and an annotated bibliography provides substantial material for further reading.

This title establishes the radical currents of thought shaping Renaissance poetry: civic humanism and apocalyptic Protestantism. The author shows how Elizabethan poets like Sidney and Spenser, often seen as conservative monarchists, responded powerfully if sometimes ambivalently to radical ideas.

The volume provides readers with a clear introduction to English Renaissance literary texts. Concise but detailed entries are alphabetically arranged, providing a coherent overview of central issues in the study of writings of the Renaissance era. Cross-referencing and suggestions for further reading indicate connections between topics.

In this timely new study, Borlik reveals the surprisingly rich potential for the emergent "green" criticism to yield fresh insights into early modern English literature. Deftly avoiding the anachronistic casting of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors as modern environmentalists, he argues that environmental issues, such as nature’s personhood, deforestation, energy use, air quality, climate change, and animal sentience, are formative concerns in many early modern texts. The readings infuse a new urgency in familiar works by Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Ralegh, Jonson, Donne, and Milton. At the same time, the book forecasts how ecocriticism will bolster the reputation of less canonical authors like Drayton, Wroth, Bruno, Gascoigne, and Cavendish. Its chapters trace provocative affinities between topics such as Pythagorean ecology and the Gaia hypothesis, Ovidian tropes and green phenomenology, the disenchantment of Nature and the Little Ice Age, and early modern pastoral poetry and modern environmental ethics. It also examines the ecological onus of Renaissance poetics, while showcasing how the Elizabethans’ sense of a sophisticated interplay between nature and art can provide a precedent for ecocriticism’s current understanding of the relationship between nature and culture as "mutually constructive." Situating plays and poems alongside an eclectic array of secondary sources, including herbals, forestry laws, husbandry manuals, almanacs, and philosophical treatises on politics and ethics, Borlik demonstrates that Elizabethan and Jacobean authors were very much aware of, and concerned about, the impact of human beings on their natural surroundings.