New Essays on History and Form in Early Modern English Literature

Nick Moschovakis, Gail Kern Paster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032437033
• eBook ISBN: 9781040097090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: Literature

This volume convenes eight noted scholars with varied positions at the interface of formal and historical literary criticism. The editors' introduction—a far-reaching account of how both methods have intersected in studies of early modern English texts since the 1990s—is the first such survey in more than 15 years, making it invaluable to scholars entering this area. Three essays address foundational questions about genre, fictionality, and formlessness; five feature close readings of texts or passages ranging from the more canonical (Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton) to the less so (an official record of the 1604 Hampton Court Conference). For scholars and students alike, the book thus models a variety of ways both to conceptualize and to analyze the value of literature at the formal–historical interface. Encompassing drama, lyric, satirical and polemical prose, and metrical as well as rhetorical and logical forms, the collection closes with an afterword by theorist Caroline Levine.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Form, History, and Value
• 1 Formless
• 2 Fictionalizing Place on the Shakespearean Stage
• 3 Genre as Sign in John Milton’s Samson Agonistes
• 4 Logical Form and the History of Divorce: Adriana’s Speech on Marriage in The Comedy of Errors
• 5 Conforming to Authority: The Summe and Substance and Satiric Expression in the Early Stuart Era
• 6 “Stand Still, You Ever-Moving Spheres of Heaven”: Form and Feeling in Dramatic Apostrophe
• 7 “A Madrigal of Procreation”: Intermedial Balletts and the Renaissance English Theater
• 8 Form and Knowledge in “Love”
• Afterword
• Index