A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies

John Lee, John Lee

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118458778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Englische Literaturkritik

Provides a detailed map of contemporary critical theory in Renaissance and Early Modern English literary studies beyond Shakespeare

A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies is a groundbreaking guide to the contemporary engagement with critical theory within the larger disciplinary area of Renaissance and Early Modern studies. Comprising commissioned contributions from leading international scholars, it provides an overview of literary theory, beyond Shakespeare, focusing on most major figures, as well as some lesser-known writers of the period.

This book represents an important first step in bridging the divide between the abundance of titles which explore applications of theory in Shakespeare studies, and the relative lack of such texts concerning English Literary Renaissance studies as a whole, which includes major figures such as Marlowe, Jonson, Donne, and Milton. The tripartite structure offers a map of the critical landscape so that students can appreciate the breadth of the work being done, along with an exploration of the ways in which the treatments of or approaches to key issues have changed over time.

Handbook of English RenaissanceLiterary Studies is must-reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of early modern and Renaissance English literature, as well as their instructors and advisors.

Divided into three main sections, "Conditions of Subjectivity, " "Spaces, Places, and Forms, " and "Practices and Theories, " A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies:

• Provides an overview of theoretical work and the theoretical-informed competencies which are central to the teaching of English Renaissance literary studies beyond Shakespeare
• Provides a map of the critical landscape of the field to provide students with an opportunity to appreciate the breadth of the work done
• Features newly-commissioned essays in representative subject areas to offer a clear picture of the contemporary theoretically-engaged work in the field
• Explores the ways in which the treatments of or approaches to key issues have changed over time
• Offers examples of the ways in which the practice of a theoretically-engaged criticism may enrich the personal and professional lives of critics, and the culture in which such critical practice takes place

Part I
Conditions of Subjectivity

1
Gender

Catherine Bates

If it was customary even 30 years ago to describe the topic of women and the English Renaissance as “gargantuan” (Woodbridge 1984, 1), then the size into which it has since grown can only defy hyperbole. Indeed, questions of the historical, cultural, and literary role that women played in the period – and the issues of gender politics, and sexuality to which these gave rise – have had a directive, defining, and arguably field‐shaping impact on the discipline. It was the women’s movement, of course, and academic feminism of the 1960s and 1970s in particular, that brought the question of gender in Renaissance literature fully out of the closet and positioned it center stage (Greer 1970; Millet 1971; Mitchell 1971; Moi 1985). Since then, the un‐self‐consciousness with which an earlier critic such as C. S. Lewis could present the literature of the English Renaissance as an almost entirely male preserve – of the 150 authors he listed, 149 were male (Lewis 1954) – has come to stand as a cautionary marker of the distance traveled, never to return. Indeed, it has become something of a rhetorical gesture to cite such older readings – in which Renaissance literature was presented as the depiction of some kind of universal human experience, addressed to and appreciated by a readership blithely generalized as “we” – in order to “measure the full distance” between a world view in which gender was effectively rendered invisible and “the one we inhabit today” (Garner and Sprengnether 1996, 4). This way of looking, in which gender has come to assume its central position in determining questions of canon‐formation and the interpretation of literary texts, has depended in large part on the immense work of recovery – undertaken by generations of critics and still, of course, ongoing – by which material written by women hitherto “lost” or considered unworthy of attention has been brought back into view and, by means of scholarly editions, anthologies, and archival resources, made widely accessible (Bogin 1976; Greer 1989; Stevenson and Davidson 2001; Pulter [1645–1665?] 2014).¹ Since much of this material previously existed only in manuscript, its availability has also contributed significantly to the new bibliography and its important re‐negotiation of the relation between manuscript and print in the early modern period, one effect being to revise the very notion of what a “text” might be said to constitute in the first place (e.g. Heale 2012). At the same time, the introduction of material such as recipes, prescriptions, health manuals, commonplace books, letters, translations, personal memoirs, diaries, and religious confessions – alongside what might be identified as more traditionally “literary” material – has, in re‐balancing the canon, altered it beyond recognition (Graham et al. 1989; Masson and Vaughan 1974; Spurling 1986; Herbert [c.1588–1600] 1998; Moody 1998). The process of recovery, moreover, has extended to the inclusion not only of women as writers but, as part of the larger imperative of establishing a corrective women’s history, to the study of women as readers (e.g., Lucas 1989; Hackett 2000), as playgoers (e.g., Findlay 1999), and as the addressees of and respondents to a culture whose models and prescriptions they may have received and been shaped by but did not necessarily absorb passively or adopt without challenge.

That it was feminism that first put gender decisively at the center of critical attention brought with it, in turn, the necessity for certain accommodations and adjustments. One example that might be cited was the need to balance the importance of extending the canon by including more female writers within it against the competing view that the “author” as such was well and truly dead or at best existed only as a disembodied “author function” (Barthes [1967] 1977; Foucault [1969] 1977). “[O]ne effect of the project to revalorize women’s writing and to reclaim forgotten or neglected texts,” writes Kate Chedgzoy, “has been a reaffirmation – against the grain, as several feminists have noted, of some influential strands of literary theory – of the significance of the author as subject of her own writing” (Chedgzoy, Hansen, and Trill 1996, 1). That is to say, there is a (fundamentally political) decision to be made if not traded between any skepticism that might be harbored toward the notion of an autonomous, sovereign, self‐identical, and ontologically stable author, on the one hand, and the merits of celebrating women writers whose previous invisibility or relegation to the margins testified to nothing so clearly as a repressive regime of silence and subordination, on the other. I use this as an example because the issue has been a critical one in feminist studies of gender in the early modern period, where scruples about methodological practice registered from early on. While the hugely important work of recovery serves to restore women to their rightful place in history and to give a voice to what has been silenced for centuries, it can also run the risk (if they are left unexamined) of perpetuating certain assumptions about authorship – notions of autonomy, ownership, privilege, mastery, agency, authority – that had led to canon‐formation of the most traditional and institutionalized kind in the first place (Ezell 1993). As Danielle Clarke articulates the dilemma, “[e]ither women can be situated as historical subjects, or we interrogate gender in such a way as to negate not only the specificity of the female subject, but its very possibility” (Clarke and Clarke 2000, 10). The aim of much feminist criticism concerned with issues of gender in the Renaissance has thus been to find a politically acceptable way of negotiating this double bind: a means by which it is still possible to celebrate women and their writing – and to accord them their due place within literary and cultural history – while at the same time fully acknowledging the constructedness of gender and the evanescence of the author function.

One advantage of shifting the debate from a discussion of “women writers” to one of “women written,” so to speak – that is, to an understanding of gender as an ideological discourse in which the definition, role, and social function of women (not to mention men) is inscribed by means of norms, custom, and law – is that it neatly sidesteps any danger of essentialism. Another benefit, equally important, is that it respectfully acknowledges the limits of recoverability. That is to say, the actual experience of so‐called “real” women (or men) in the historical past is manifestly not recoverable. The discourse of gender, however – which can be traced and analyzed in a myriad materials from literary texts to historical documents to cultural practices and events – is not only most definitely recoverable but, more to the point, links the past with the present in an unbroken historical continuum. Contemporary critics (female and male) are no less inscribed within an ideological discourse of gender in the twenty‐first century than men and women were in the Renaissance, even if the terms of that discourse may have changed over time. The unalterable otherness of that past can be fully acknowledged and respected, therefore, while the structures that shaped the worldview, experience, and self‐understanding of its inhabitants can at the same time be fully scrutinized by critics equipped with all the know‐how that issues from being no less shaped by ideological structures themselves, however different those structures might be. The critic’s sense of his or her own “self‐fashioning” by the ideological discourses of their own time – discourses within which they live, move, and have their being – is, consequently, a major asset in their analysis and understanding of the past. As Gary Waller noted, this was something that feminist studies of gender in the early modern period acknowledged early on:

this particular kind of feminist criticism is not only determined to discover, revive, and publish writing by Renaissance women, but also to raise questions related to women’s own discourse, the linguistic and discursive structures of women’s writing, and even the gender‐specific nature of our own scholarly or critical discourse.

(Waller 1985, 238–239)

Seen thus, the question of gender in the early modern period becomes something that can be read – as a discourse inscribed within the inexhaustible material that historians and literary critics continue to unearth from the past, it is perfectly legible – by readers who have every reason to be fully apprised of the mechanics of ideological interpellation themselves. In her now foundational essay, for example, Joan Kelly‐Gadol noted that “the relations between the ideology of sex roles and the reality we want to get at are complex and difficult to establish,” not least because “[s]uch views may be prescriptive rather than descriptive” (Kelly‐Gadol 1977, 176–177). The point, however, is that prescription and description are both equally “scripted” and, as such, eminently readable. Only the most naïve of readings would assume that either kind of script could open a window onto “reality,” whatever that is, or somehow make such a thing miraculously accessible centuries later. Rather, those scripts provide the raw material for analyzing the workings of ideology in action: in this case, the ideological discourse of gender. In his study of sex and gender in the Renaissance period – which, as he acknowledges, is heavily indebted to didactic and prescriptive material such as sermons, conduct manuals, and advice literature – the historian Anthony Fletcher writes that “[t]he necessary link between ideology and experience or practice is prescription”, and concl...