Representing The English Renaissance

"An exciting collection of essays on English Renaissance literature and culture, this book contributes substantially to the contemporary renaissance in historical modes of critical inquiry."--Margaret W. Ferguson, Columbia University "An exciting collection of essays on English Renaissance literature and culture, this book contributes substantially to the contemporary renaissance in historical modes of critical inquiry."--Margaret W. Ferguson, Columbia University

Forming Sleep asks how biocultural and literary dynamics act together to shape conceptions of sleep states in the early modern period. Engaging with poetry, drama, and prose largely written in English between 1580 and 1670, the essays in this collection highlight period discussions about how seemingly insentient states might actually enable self-formation. Looking at literary representations of sleep through formalism, biopolitics, Marxist theory, trauma theory, and affect theory, this volume envisions sleep states as a means of defining the human condition, both literally and metaphorically. The contributors examine a range of archival sources—including texts in early modern faculty psychology, printed and manuscript medical treatises and physicians’ notes, and printed ephemera on pathological sleep—through the lenses of both classical and contemporary philosophy. Essays apply these frameworks to genres such as drama, secular lyric, prose treatise, epic, and religious verse. Taken together, these essays demonstrate how early modern depictions of sleep shape, and are shaped by, the philosophical, medical, political, and, above all, formal discourses through which they are articulated. With this in mind, the question of form merges considerations of the physical and the poetic with the spiritual and the secular, highlighting the pervasiveness of sleep states as a means by which to reflect on the human condition. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Brian Chalk, Jennifer Lewin, Cassie Miura, Benjamin Parris, Giulio Pertile, N. Amos Rothschild, Garret A. Sullivan Jr., and Timothy A. Turner.

How do the formal properties of early modern texts, together with the materials that envelop and shape them, relate to the cultural, political, and social world of their production? Formal matters: Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature answers this question by linking formalist analysis with the insights of book history. It thus represents the new English Renaissance literary historiography tying literary composition to the materials and material practices of writing. The book combines studies of familiar and lesser known texts, from the poems and plays of Shakespeare to jests and printed commonplace books. Its ten studies make important, original contributions to research on the genres of early modern literature, focusing on the involvement of literary forms in the scribal and print cultures of compilation, continuation, translation, and correspondence, as well as in matters of political republicanism and popular piety, among others. Taken together, the collection’s essays exemplify how an attention to form and matter can historicise writing without abandoning a literary focus.

This book considers popular culture's confrontations with the history, thought, and major figures of the English Renaissance through an analysis of 'period films,' television productions, popular literature, and punk music.

"Two ideas lie at the heart of this study and its claim that we need a new history of reading: that voices in books can affect us deeply ; that printed books can be brought to life with the voice. Voices and Books offers a new history of reading focussed on the oral and voice-aware silent reader, rather than the historical reader we have privileged in the last few decades, who is invariably male, silent, and alone. It recovers the vocality of education for boys and girls in Renaissance England, and the importance of training in pronuntiatio (delivery) for oral-aural literary culture. It offers the first attempt to recover the voice-and tone-from textual sources. It explores what happens when we bring voice to text, how vocal tone realizes or changes textual meaning, and how the literary writers of the past tried to represent their own and others' voices, as well as manage and exploit the voices of their readers. It offers fresh readings of the key Tudor authors who anticipated oral readers: John Bale, Anne Askew, William Baldwin, Thomas Nashe. And it aims to rethink what a printed book can be, searching the printed page for vocal cues, and exploring the neglected role of the voice in the printing process"-- Provided by publisher.

Andrew Escobedo here seeks to provide a new understanding of the emergence of national consciousness in England, showing that many Renaissance writers articulated their Englishness temporally, through an engagement with a history they perceived as lost or alienated. According to Escobedo, the English experienced nationalism as a form of community that disrupted earlier religious and social identities, making it difficult to link the national present to the medieval past. Furthermore, he argues, the English faced the nation's temporal isolation before the Enlightenment narrative of historical progress emerged as a means to interpret novelty in a positive light. Escobedo examines how John Foxe, John Dee, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton used narrative representations of nationhood to mediate what they perceived as a troubling breach in history, attempting to bring together the English past, present, and near future in a complete and continuous story. Yet all four authors also register their concern that historical loss may be an inevitable feature of a "modern" England, and they come to see their narratives as long tapestries that spontaneously rip apart as they grow, obliging the weaver to return to repair them. Focusing on Renaissance England's perplexing sense of its time-boundedness, Escobedo presents early national consciousness as stranded awkwardly between the premodern and modern.

This text explores the perceived discrepancy between outward appearance and inward disposition which, it argues, influenced the work of many English Renaissance dramatists and poets. The author examines various connections between religious, legal, sexual and theatrical ideas of inward truth.