Celebrating Mutabilitie

Author : Catherine Nicholson
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691198985
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene written by Catherine Nicholson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Despite its canonical prestige, Edmund Spenser's epic six-part poem The Faerie Queene (1590-96) has never been easy or altogether pleasurable to read. As this book describes, the poem's first known reader, Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey, did so under duress, and returned the manuscript with a plea that Spenser write something else instead. Virginia Woolf's tongue-in-cheek advice to twentieth-century readers eager to cultivate a taste for The Faerie Queene-"The first essential is, of course, not to read The Faerie Queene"-sums up a tradition of readerly resistance to the poem. As a consequence of its difficulty, the poem has an extraordinary capacity to induce doubt in readers-about Spenser, about themselves, and about the enterprise of reading itself. Each of the six chapters in Nicholson's book considers the poem through the lens of a different readership: scholars; schoolchildren; compilers of commonplace books, who value specific elements about the poem; Queen Elizabeth, the ostensible subject of the poem; and readers who, across the centuries, ultimately failed to understand the poem. Rather than tell us how to read Spenser's work, Nicholson describes how these individual readers, from learned scholars to precocious schoolboys, jealous queens to algorithmic search engines, have generated meaning and pleasure from an unusual and difficult text. Throughout, the author argues that that The Faerie Queene can be read not simply as literature but as literary theory, a reflection on what reading does to texts, readers, and the worlds they live in"--

Author : Jane Grogan
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780719082245
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Celebrating Mutabilitie written by Jane Grogan and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first collection of essays devoted to Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos (1609), and it celebrates the 400th anniversary of the first publication of that intriguing, posthumously-published fragment of his unfinished epic, The Faerie Queene (1590-96). It brings together leading and emerging Spenser scholars from the US, UK, Ireland and India to asses and assert the significance of the Mutabilitie Cantos to Spenser’s work and thought. All eleven essays are origional and specially commissioning for this substantial volume with contributions from James Nohrnberg, Gordon Teskey and Judith Anderson. Although broadly historical, in keeping the principles with The Manchester Spenser series, the collections encompasses an impressive variety of approaches and interests, ranging from historical allegory and material, political, philosophical and literary contexts of the Mutabilitie Cantos, as well as their commanding place in early modern English and Irish literature and history. The collection also includes a full bibliography of scholarly criticism of the Mutabilitie Cantos. This collection will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students, to scholars of Spenser and scholars of renaissance studies.

Author : Walter Melion
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004310436
Total Pages : 787 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Personification written by Walter Melion and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-03-11 with total page 787 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this volume is to formulate an alternative account of personification, to demonstrate the ingenuity with which this multifaceted device was utilized by late medieval and early modern authors and artists in Italy, England, Scotland, and the Low Countries

Author : Andrew Hadfield
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0198703007
Total Pages : 647 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Edmund Spenser written by Andrew Hadfield and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The first biography in sixty years of the most important non-dramatic poet of the English Renaissance"--From publisher description.

Author : Jim Ellis
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810145316
Total Pages : 323 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Poem, the Garden, and the World written by Jim Ellis and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-15 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How an early modern understanding of place and movement are embedded in a performative theory of literature How is a garden like a poem? Early modern writers frequently compared the two, and as Jim Ellis shows, the metaphor gained strength with the arrival of a spectacular new art form—the Renaissance pleasure garden—which immersed visitors in a political allegory to be read by their bodies’ movements. The Poem, the Garden, and the World traces the Renaissance-era relationship of place and movement from garden to poetry to a confluence of both. Starting with the Earl of Leicester’s pleasure garden for Queen Elizabeth’s 1575 progress visit, Ellis explores the political function of the entertainment landscape that plunged visitors into a fully realized golden world—a mythical new form to represent the nation. Next, he turns to one of that garden’s visitors: Philip Sidney, who would later contend that literature’s golden worlds work to move us as we move through them, reorienting readers toward a belief in English empire. This idea would later be illustrated by Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen; as with the pleasure garden, both characters and readers are refashioned as they traverse the poem’s dreamlike space. Exploring the artistic creations of three of the era’s major figures, Ellis argues for a performative understanding of literature, in which readers are transformed as they navigate poetic worlds.

Author : Ayesha Ramachandran
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022628882X
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Worldmakers written by Ayesha Ramachandran and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this beautifully conceived book, Ayesha Ramachandran reconstructs the imaginative struggles of early modern artists, philosophers, and writers to make sense of something that we take for granted: the world, imagined as a whole. Once a new, exciting, and frightening concept, “the world” was transformed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But how could one envision something that no one had ever seen in its totality? The Worldmakers moves beyond histories of globalization to explore how “the world” itself—variously understood as an object of inquiry, a comprehensive category, and a system of order—was self-consciously shaped by human agents. Gathering an international cast of characters, from Dutch cartographers and French philosophers to Portuguese and English poets, Ramachandran describes a history of firsts: the first world atlas, the first global epic, the first modern attempt to develop a systematic natural philosophy—all part of an effort by early modern thinkers to capture “the world” on the page.

Author : Marco Nievergelt
Publisher : DS Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1843843285
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Allegorical Quests from Deguileville to Spenser written by Marco Nievergelt and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2012 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of sixteenth-century quest narratives, focussing on their conscious use of a medieval tradition to hold a mirror up to contemporary culture. Offers the first full study of the allegorical knightly quest tradition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Richly satisfying, as impressive in the detail of its scholarship as in the elegance of its critical formulations. It seamlessly moves between different literary traditions and across conventional period boundaries. In Dr Nievergelt's treatment of this theme, the successive retellings of the tale of the knight's quest come to stand as an emblemof shifting values and norms, both religious and worldly; and of our repeated failures to realise those ideals. Dr Alex Davis, Department of English, University of St Andrews. The literary motif of the "allegorical knightly quest" appears repeatedly in the literature of the late medieval/early modern period, notably in Spenser, but has hitherto been little examined. Here, in his examination of a number of sixteenth-century English allegorical-chivalric quest narratives, focussing on Spenser's Faerie Queene but including important, lesser-known works such as Stephen Bateman's Travayled Pylgrime and William Goodyear's Voyage of the Wandering Knight, the author argues that the tradition begins with the French writer Guillaume de Deguileville. His seminal Pèlerinage de la vie humaine was composed c.1331-1355; it was widely adapted, translated, rewritten and printed overthe next centuries. Dr Nievergelt goes on to demonstrate how this essentially "medieval" literary form could be adapted to articulate reflections on changing patterns of identity, society and religion during the early modern period; and how it becomes a vehicle of self-exploration and self-fashioning during a period of profound cultural crisis. Dr Marco Nievergelt is Lecturer (Maître Assitant) and SNF (Swiss National Science Foundation) Research Fellow in the English Department at the Université de Lausanne

Author : Jennifer C. Vaught
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317169654
Total Pages : 231 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Carnival and Literature in Early Modern England written by Jennifer C. Vaught and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carnival and Literature in Early Modern England explores the elite and popular festive materials appropriated by authors during the English Renaissance in a wide range of dramatic and non-dramatic texts. Although historical records of rural, urban, and courtly seasonal customs in early modern England exist only in fragmentary form, Jennifer Vaught traces the sustained impact of festivals and rituals on the plays and poetry of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers. She focuses on the diverse ways in which Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Dekker, Jonson, Milton and Herrick incorporated the carnivalesque in their works. Further, she demonstrates how these early modern texts were used-and misused-by later writers, performers, and inventors of spectacles, notably Mardi Gras krewes organizing parades in the American Deep South. The works featured here often highlight violent conflicts between individuals of different ranks, ethnicities, and religions, which the author argues reflect the social realities of the time. These Renaissance writers responded to republican, egalitarian notions of liberty for the populace with radical support, ambivalence, or conservative opposition. Ultimately, the vital, folkloric dimension of these plays and poems challenges the notion that canonical works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries belong only to 'high' and not to 'low' culture.

Author : Alex Davis
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192592122
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare written by Alex Davis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Impossible bequests of the soul; an outlawed younger son who rises to become justice of the king's forests; the artificially-preserved corpse of the heir to an empire; a medieval clerk kept awake at night by fears of falling; a seventeenth-century noblewoman who commissions copies upon copies of her genealogy; Elizabethan efforts to eradicate Irish customs of succession; thoughts of the legacy of sin bequeathed to mankind by our first parents, Adam and Eve. This book explores how inheritance was imagined between the lifetimes of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The writing composed during this period was the product of what the historian Georges Duby has called a 'society of heirs', in which inheritance functioned as a key instrument of social reproduction, acting to ensure that existing structures of status, wealth, familial power, political influence, and gender relations were projected from the present into the future. In poetry, prose, and drama—in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and his Canterbury Tales; in Spenser's Faerie Queene; in plays by Shakespeare such as Macbeth, As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice; and in a host of other works—we encounter a range of texts that attests to the extraordinary imaginative reach of questions of inheritance between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Moving between the late medieval and early modern periods, Imagining Inheritance examines this body of writing in order to argue that an exploration of the ways in which premodern inheritance was imagined can make legible the deep structures of power that modernity wants to forget.

Author : Yulia Ryzhik
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 152611738X
Total Pages : 405 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Spenser and Donne written by Yulia Ryzhik and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-07 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection of essays, part of The Manchester Spenser series, brings together leading Spenser and Donne scholars to challenge the traditionally dichotomous view of these two major poets and to shift the critical conversation towards a more holistic, relational view of the two authors’ poetics and thought.