The Choise of Valentines
Author: Thomas Nash
Publisher:
Published: 1899
Total Pages: 48
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPosts
Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry
Author: Joshua Eckhardt
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2009-05-21
Total Pages: 318
ISBN-13: 0191569747
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book reappraises the work of early-seventeenth-century collectors of English Renaissance poetry in manuscript. The verse miscellanies, or poetry anthologies, of these collectors have long attracted the attention of literary editors looking for texts by individual, major authors, and they have more recently interested historians for their poems on affairs of state, called verse libels. By contrast, this book investigates the relationships that the compilers of miscellanies established between such presumably literary and political texts. It focuses on two of the most popular, and least printable, literary genres that they collected: libels, and anti-courtly love poetry, a literary mode that the collectors of John Donne's poems played a major role in establishing. They made Donne the most popular poet in manuscripts of the period, and they demonstrated a special affinity for his most erotic or obscene poems, such as 'To his Mistress going to bed' and 'The Anagram'. Donne collectors also exhibited the similarities between these Ovidian love elegies and the sexually explicit or counter-Petrarchan verse of other authors, thereby organizing a literary genre opposed to the conventions of courtly love lyrics. Furthermore, collectors politicized this genre by relating examples of it to libels. In so doing, manuscript verse collectors demonstrated a type of literary and political activity distinct from that of authors, stationers, and readers. Based on a thorough investigation of manuscript verse miscellanies, the book appeals to scholars and students of early modern English literature and history, Donne studies, manuscript studies, and the history of the book.
Shakespeare Among the Courtesans
Author: Duncan Salkeld
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-01
Total Pages: 261
ISBN-13: 1317056671
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCourtesans - women who achieve wealth, status, or power through sexual transgression - have played both a central and contradictory role in literature: they have been admired, celebrated, feared, and vilified. This study of the courtesan in Renaissance English drama focuses not only on the moral ambivalence of these women, but with special attention to Anglo-Italian relations, illuminates little known aspects of their lives. It traces the courtesan from a wry comedic character in the plays of Terence and Plautus to its literary exhaustion in the seventeenth-century dramatic works of Dekker, Marston, Webster, Middleton, Shirley and Brome. The author focuses especially on the presentation of the courtesan in the sixteenth century - dramas by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Lyly view the courtesan as a symbol of social disease and decay, transforming classical conventions into English prejudices. Renaissance Anglo-Italian cultural and sexual relations are also investigated through comparisons of travel narratives, original source materials, and analysis of Aretino's representations of celebrated Italian courtesans. Amid these fascinating tales of aspiration, desire and despair lingers the intriguing question of who was the 'dark lady' of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman
Author: M.L. Stapleton
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-05-23
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 1317166450
DOWNLOAD EBOOKContributions to this volume explore the idea of Marlowe as a working artist, in keeping with John Addington Symonds' characterization of him as a "sculptor-poet." Throughout the body of his work-including not only the poems and plays, but also his forays into translation and imitation-a distinguished company of established and emerging literary scholars traces how Marlowe conceives an idea, shapes and refines it, then remakes and remodels it, only to refashion it further in his writing process. These essays necessarily overlap with one another in the categories of lives, stage, and page, which signals their interdependent nature regarding questions of authorship, theater and performance history, as well as interpretive issues within the works themselves. The contributors interpret and analyze the disputed facts of Marlowe's life, the textual difficulties that emerge from the staging of his plays, the critical investigations arising from analyses of individual works, and their relationship to those of his contemporaries. The collection engages in new ways the controversies and complexities of its subject's life and art. It reflects the flourishing state of Marlowe studies as it shapes the twenty-first century conception of the poet and playwright as master craftsman.
The Impotency Poem from Ancient Latin to Restoration English Literature
Author: Hannah Lavery
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-03
Total Pages: 216
ISBN-13: 1317027663
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first book length study of the motif of impotency in poetry from early antiquity through to the late Restoration, this book explores the impotency poem as a recognisable form of poetry in the longer tradition of erotic elegy. Hannah Lavery’s central claim is that the impotency motif is adopted by poets in recognition of its potential to signify satirically through its use as symbol and allegory. By drawing together analysis of works in the tradition, Lavery shows how the impotency motif is used to engage with anxieties as to what it means to enact ’service’ within political and social contexts. She demonstrates that impotency poems can be seen on one level to represent bawdy escapism, but on the other to offer positions of resistance and opposition to social and political concerns contemporary to a particular time. Whilst the link between the 'Imperfect Enjoyment' poems by Ovid and Rochester is well known, Lavery here looks further back to the origins of the concept of male impotency as degradation in the works of earlier Roman poets. This is an important context for considering how the impotency poem then first appears in the French and English vernaculars during the sixteenth century, leading to translations and adaptations throughout the seventeenth century. Lavery's close readings of the poems consider both the nature of the literary form, and the political and social contexts within which the works appear, in order to chart the intertextual development of the impotency poem as a distinct form of writing in the early modern period.
Early Modern Prose Fiction
Author: Naomi Conn Liebler
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-12-05
Total Pages: 202
ISBN-13: 1134245114
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEmphasizing the significance of early modern prose fiction as a hybrid genre that absorbed cultural, ideological and historical strands of the age, this fascinating study brings together an outstanding cast of critics including: Sheila T. Cavanaugh, Stephen Guy-Bray, Mary Ellen Lamb, Joan Pong Linton, Steve Mentz, Constance C. Relihan, Goran V. Stanivukovic with an afterword from Arthur Kinney. Each of the essays in this collection considers the reciprocal relation of early modern prose fiction to class distinctions, examining factors such as: the impact of prose fiction on the social, political and economic fabric of early modern England the way in which a growing emphasis on literacy allowed for increased class mobility and newly flexible notions of class how the popularity of reading and the subsequent demand for books led to the production and marketing of books as an industry complications for critics of prose fiction, as it began to be considered an inferior and trivial art form. Early modern prose fiction had a huge impact on the social and economic fabric of the time, creating a new culture of reading and writing for pleasure which became accessible to those previously excluded from such activities, resulting in a significant challenge to existing class structures.
Thomas Nashe
Author: Georgia Brown
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-03-02
Total Pages: 879
ISBN-13: 1351879049
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe current surge of interest in the Elizabethan poet, dramatist, prose-writer and critic, Thomas Nashe, follows years of neglect or undisguised hostility. Yet, as early allusions testify, Nashe was a name which imposed itself on contemporary culture. Nashe annoyed and even disturbed his contemporaries, but they certainly paid attention to him because he pioneered new approaches to writing, and indeed to living, and because he was an astute critic. The essays in this volume have been chosen for the skill with which they present diverse approaches to key issues in Nashe. All Nashe's texts are covered, as are his relationships with contemporaries, like Shakespeare. The introduction analyses different approaches, locating them in the history of Nashe criticism, and suggests areas for future research. It argues that Nashe's importance to Renaissance studies lies in his anomalousness, as he forces us to rethink the Renaissance. He makes the Renaissance unfamiliar again, and pushes criticism out of its comfort zone.
Have with yov to Saffron-Walden. Nashes lenten stvffe. Svmmers last will and testament. Shorter pieces. Doubtful works
Author: Thomas Nash
Publisher:
Published: 1905
Total Pages: 418
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Works of Thomas Nashe: Have with yov to Saffron-Walden. Nashes lenten stvffe. Svmmers last will and testament. Shorter pieces. Doubtful works
Author: Thomas Nash
Publisher:
Published: 1905
Total Pages: 432
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England
Author: Valerie Traub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2002-06-06
Total Pages: 516
ISBN-13: 9780521448857
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England is the eagerly-awaited study by the feminist scholar who was among the first to address the issue of early modern female homoeroticism. Valerie Traub analyzes the representation of female-female love, desire and eroticism in a range of early modern discourses, including poetry, drama, visual arts, pornography and medicine. Contrary to the silence and invisibility typically ascribed to lesbianism in the Renaissance, Traub argues that the early modern period witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of representations of such desire. By means of sophisticated interpretations of a comprehensive set of texts, the book not only charts a crucial shift in representations of female homoeroticism over the course of the seventeenth century, but also offers a provocative genealogy of contemporary lesbianism. A contribution to the history of sexuality and to feminist and queer theory, the book addresses current theoretical preoccupations through the lens of historical inquiry.
