Spenser S Forms Of History

In Spenser's Forms of History, Bart Van Es presents an engaging study of the ways in which Edmund Spenser utilized a number of "forms of history"--chronicle, antiquarian discourse, secular typology, political prophecy, and others--in both his poetry and his prose, and assesses their collective impact on Elizabethan poetry.

Bart van Es presents a study of the ways in which Edmund Spenser utilized a number of 'forms of history' - chronicle, antiquarian discourse, secular typology, political prophecy and others - in both his poetry and his prose and assesses their collective impact on Elizabethan poetry.

This book considers four centuries of Spenser criticism, locating critics in ongoing discussions of Spenser's poetry and the cultural contexts of their time.

Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas was the most popular and widely-imitated poet in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and Scotland. C. S. Lewis felt that a reconsideration of his works' British reception was 'long overdue' back in the 1950s, and this study finally provides the first comprehensive account of how English-speaking authors read, translated, imitated, and eventually discarded Du Bartas' model for Protestant poetry. The first part shows that Du Bartas' friendship with James VI and I was key to his later popularity. Du Bartas' poetry symbolized a transnational Protestant literary culture in Huguenot France and Britain. Through Jamesâ intervention, Scottish literary tastes had a significant impact in England. Later chapters assess how Sidney, Spenser, Milton, and many other poets justified writing poetic fictions in reaction to Du Bartas' austere emphasis on scriptural truth. These chapters give equal attention to how Du Bartas' example offered a route into original verse composition for male and female poets across the literate population. Du Bartas' Legacy in England and Scotland responds to recent developments in transnational and translation studies, the history of reading, women's writing, religious literature, and manuscript studies. It argues that Du Bartas' legacy deserves far greater prominence than it has previously received because it offers a richer, more democratic, and more accurate view of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, Scottish, and French literature and religious culture.

This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

In this study, Michael Ullyot makes two new arguments about the rhetoric of exemplarity in late Elizabethan and Jacobean culture: first, that exemplarity is a recursive cycle driven by rhetoricians' words and readers' actions; and second, that positive moral examples are not replicable, but rather aspirational models of readers' posthumous biographies. For example, Alexander the Great envied Achilles less for his exemplary life than for Homer's account of it. Ullyot defines the three types of decorum on which exemplary rhetoric and imitation rely, and charts their operations through Philip Sidney's poetics, Edmund Spenser's poetry, and the dedications, sermons, elegies, biographies, and other occasional texts about Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, and Henry, Prince of Wales. Ullyot expands the definition of occasional texts to include those that criticize their circumstances to demand better ones, and historicizes moral exemplarity in the contexts of sixteenth-century Protestant memory and humanist pedagogy. The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England concludes that all exemplary subjects suffer from the problem of metonymy, the objection that their chosen excerpts misrepresent their missing parts. This problem also besets historicist literary criticism, ever subject to corrections from the archive, so this study concedes that its own rhetorical methods are exemplary.

Exemplary Spenser analyses the reading experience of The Faerie Queene, as it is construed through the didactic poetics espoused in the Letter to Ralegh. Grogan pays close attention to Spenser's interrogation of visual as well as literary paradigms of knowledge and moral learning, and to his influences, including Sidney, Plutarch, and, importantly, Xenophon.

"The first biography in sixty years of the most important non-dramatic poet of the English Renaissance"--From publisher description.