This title offers the first comprehensive study of the sudden appearance and rise to popularity of the moralistic prose pamphlet. Its interest lies not just in the pamphlet's subject matter but also in the literary techniques developed by its authors to appeal to a newly literate and growing audience. Clark shows what knowledge of the pamphleteers' choice and presentation of their topical material can contribute to our understanding of Elizabethan thought and society.
Offering an analysis of the ways in which groups of non-aristocratic women circumvented a number of interdictions against female participation in the pamphlet culture of revolutionary England, this book is primarily a study of female agency. Despite the fact that pamphlets, or cheap unbound books, have recently been located among the most inclusive or democratic aspects of the social life of early modern England, this study provides a more gender-sensitive picture. Marcus Nevitt argues instead that throughout the revolutionary decades pamphlet culture was actually constructed around the public silence and exclusion of women. In support of his thesis, he discusses more familiar seventeenth-century authors such as John Milton, John Selden and Thomas Edwards in relation to the less canonical but equally forceful writings of Katherine Chidley, Elizabeth Poole, Mary Pope, 'Parliament Joan' and a large number of Quaker women. This is the first sustained study of the relationship between female agency and cheap print throughout the revolutionary decades 1640 to 1660. It adds to the study of gender in the field of the English Revolution by engaging with recent work in the history of the book, stressing the materiality of texts and the means and physical processes by which women's writing emerged through the printing press and networks of publication and dissemination. It will stimulate welcome debate about the nature and limits of discursive freedom in the early modern period, and for women in particular.
The English civil wars radically altered many aspects of mid-seventeenth century life, simultaneously creating a period of intense uncertainty and unheralded opportunity. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the printing and publishing industry, which between 1640 and 1660 produced a vast number of tracts and pamphlets on a bewildering variety of subjects. Many of these where of a highly political nature, the publication of which would have been unthinkable just a few years before. Whilst scholars have long recognised the importance of these publications, and have studied in depth what was written in them, much less work has been done on why they were produced. In this book Dr Peacey first highlights the different dynamics at work in the conception, publication and distribution of polemical works, and then pulls the strands together to study them against the wider political context. In so doing he provides a more complete understanding of the relationship between political events and literary and intellectual prose in an era of unrest and upheaval. By incorporating into the political history of the period some of the approaches utilized by scholars of book history, this study reveals the heightened importance of print in both the lives of members of the political nation and the minds of the political elite in the civil wars and Interregnum. Furthermore, it demonstrates both the existence and prevalence of print propaganda with which politicians became associated, and traces the processes by which it came to be produced, the means of detecting its existence, the ways in which politicians involved themselves in its production, the uses to which it was put, and the relationships between politicians and propagandists.
Curtis Breight challenges the view that Renaissance English rulers could not dominate their domestic population. He argues, alternatively, that the Elizabethan state was controlled by the Cecilian faction, which maintained power by focusing English energies outwardly. Cecilians launched relentless assaults by land and sea against England's neighbours. By the 1590s their policies had enriched a few yet destroyed countless people, and this book reads the drama of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare in relation to ongoing national and international conflict.
As voyeuristic and prurient as today's tabloid newspapers, early modern crime pamphlets and broadside ballads about women murderers tell of furtive love affairs and domestic poisonings, of battered wives who kill their abusive husbands, and of troubled mothers who murder their children. On first acquaintance, many pamphlets leave an impression of shallow sensationalism yoked to idealised repentance, and for that reason modern critics and historians have often discounted their importance as culturally significant artifacts. This volume presents a selection of over forty texts and is intended to encourage a reconsideration of these views. In his Introductory Note to the volume, Randall Martin discusses the narrative content and social commentary of these ballads, pamphlets and trial reports, and the contribution that they make to the discursive construction of the early modern female murderer through their representational strategies and evolving legal and gender contexts.
The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The authors examine how popular culture impacted upon people's everyday lives during the period, helping to define how individuals and groups experienced the world. Issues as disparate as popular reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and superstition, and the function of festivals and rituals are discussed. This research companion will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early modern history and culture.
Literary historians have been giving increased attention to texts that have hitherto been largely ignored. The works of women, the disenfranchised, and "commoners" have all benefited from such critical analysis. Similarly, letters, memoirs, popular poetry, and serialized fiction have become the subject of scholarly inquiry. Elizabethan fiction has also profited from the newer odes of critical inquiry. Such texts as George Gascoigne's The Adventurers of Master F.J., John Lyly's Euphues, George Pettie's A Petite Palace of Pettie his Pleasure, or Nicolas Breton's The Miseries of Mavilla have often been seen as the work of "hack" writers, inelegant aberrations that demonstrated little about the culture of 16th-century Britain or the development of English fiction. This collection of original essays draws on a wide range of critical and theoretical approaches, especially those influenced by various elements of feminism, Marxism, and cultural studies. They illuminate the richness of canonical examples of Elizabethan fiction (Sidney's Arcadia) and less widely read works (Henry Chettle's Piers Plainess).
Readers in the sixteenth century read (that is, interpreted) texts quite differently from the way contemporary readers do; they were trained to notice different aspects of a text and to process them differently.Using educational works of Erasmus, Ascham, and others, commentaries on literary works, various kinds of religious guides and homilies, and self-improvement books, Kintgen has found specific evidence of these differences and makes imaginative use of it to draw fascinating and convincing conclusions about the art and practice of reading. Kintgen ends by situating the book within literary theory, cognitive science, and literary studies.Among the writers covered are Gabriel Harvey, E. K. (the commentator on The Shepheardes Calendar), Sir John Harrington, George Gascoigne, George Puttenham, Thomas Blundeville, and Angel Day.
"From 1570 to 1630 prose fiction was an upstart in English culture, still defined in relation to poetry and drama yet invested with its own considerable power and potential. In these years, a community of writers arrived on the scene in London and strove to make a name for themselves largely from the prose that they produced at an astonishing rate. Modern scholars of the Renaissance have attempted to measure this prose against such standards as humanist culture or the emerging novel. But the prose fiction written by Lyly, Greene, and their imitators has eluded modern readers even more than the works of Shakespeare and Spenser. In Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction, Reid Barbour studies three interwoven case histories - those of Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Dekker - and explores their favorite tropes and figures. In response to one another, these three writers attempt to define, liberate, and question the boundaries of prose. That is, they want to secure for prose a new and powerful status in an age when its parameters are unclear and its rivals still valorized but its parameters unbounded. Barbour argues that Nashe absorbs but also rejects the agendas of Greene's prose, offering alternative tropes in their place. Dekker parodies Nashe but unsettles any scheme for stabilizing prose, including those set forth by Nashe himself." "This work centers on three terms that Greene, Nashe, and Dekker obviously could not get off their minds: decipher, discover, and stuff. The first two terms, pervasive in Greene, make specific and complex demands on narrative and its readers. With stuff however, Nashe and Dekker cultivate an extemporal and a material prose, and challenge the fictions that decipher and discover, from romance to roguery. These key words not only situate prose in regard to poetry, drama, and the world; they also raise crucial Renaissance questions about order and duty, faith and doubt. Accordingly, their frame of reference extends from Renaissance poetics and narratology to a nascent Epicureanism and neoskepticism. In an about-face, prose becomes the standard by which the rest of Elizabethan and early Stuart culture is measured, even as prose is constituted by that culture." "With three of the most popular English Renaissance writers as his focus, Barbour reassesses the question of how (or whether) Elizabethan fiction is an ancestor of the novel. Students of the novel have recently intensified their search for the origins of Defoe, Dickens, and Woolf. But Elizabethan prose fiction challenges the novel rather than founds it. In its conclusion, then, Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction considers responses to Elizabethan prose, from Behn to Joyce."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
