Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson

Laureations

Kathy Lavezzo, Roze Hentschell

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781611493825
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book brings together new essays by leading cultural critics who have been influenced by the groundbreaking scholarship of Richard Helgerson. The original essays penned for this anthology evince the ongoing impact of Helgerson's work in major critical debates including national identity, literary careerism, and studies of form. Analyzing not only early modern but also medieval literary texts, the pieces that comprise Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson: Laureations respond to both Helgerson's more famous scholarly works and the whole range of his critical corpus, from his earliest work on prodigality to his latest writings on mid-sixteenth century European poets. The interdisciplinary, transnational, and comparativist spirit of Helgerson's criticism is reflected in the essays, as is his commitment to studies of multiple genres that nevertheless attend to the particularities of form.Contributors offer new interpretations of several of Shakespeare's plays—Hamlet, I Henry IV, The Tempest, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear—and other dramas such as Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, the anonymous drama The London Prodigal, and Stephen Greenblatt and John Mee's contemporary play Cardenio. In keeping with Helgerson's comparativist turn, the volume includes analyses of Joachim Du Bellay's poetry and Donato Gianotti's discussion of The Divine Comedy. Prose works featured in the volume encompass More's Utopia and Isaac Walton's The Compleat Angler. Spenser's early poetry and the medieval romance Floris and Blanchflour also receive new readings.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Part I: Community, Colonialism, and Nationhood
• Chapter 1: Influence, Appropriation, Piracy
• Chapter 2: Idleness, Humanist Industry, and English Colonial Activity in Thomas More’s “fruitfull, pleasant,” “wittie” and “profitable” Utopia
• Chapter 3: Amorous Scholastics
• Part II: Dramatic Forms
• Chapter 4: Delivery Rooms
• Chapter 5: One Head Is Better than Two
• Chapter 6: About Suffering and on Dying
• Part III: Travel and Geography
• Chapter 7: Dante, Michelangelo, and What We Talk about When We Talk about Poetry
• Chapter 8: The Pleasures of the Land in Restoration England
• Part IV: The Literary Career
• Chapter 9: Rival Laureates and Multiple Monuments
• Chapter 10: Du Bellay’s “Source de Meduse”
• Chapter 11: The Jacobean Prodigals
• Chapter 12: Religious Affiliation in Elizabethan London
• Afterword: Helgersonland
• Richard Helgerson: A Bibliography