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Abraham Fraunce’s The Shepherds’ Logic (c. 1585) is one of the first English adaptations of Petrus Ramus’s Dialecticae libri duo (1556). Preserved in a manuscript also containing two shorter essays on Ramist dialectic, the work was later modified and enlarged for publication as The Lawyers’ Logic (1588). But Fraunce’s substantial and almost exclusive use of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherds’ Calendar (1579) as the source for practical examples makes the manuscript treatise a unique document revealing the influence of the Ramist reform of the arts of discourse on the new literary elite led by Philip Sidney and Gabriel Harvey. This is the first published critical edition of Fraunceâ...
Despite various influential writers' and critics' high praise of the poetry of Richard Barnfield (1574-1620/26?), his work has long been marginalized in English literary history because of its pervasive homoeroticism. Current interest in literary representations of gender and sexuality, in dissent from dominant ideologies, and in the early modern possibilities of same-sexual subjectivities, accounts for the renewed interest in Barnfield's poetry. This new collection of essays seeks to provide a forum for his evaluation and reinterpretation in accord with his topicality for literary studies today.
"The myth of Sisyphus symbolizes the archetypal process of becoming without the consolation of absolute achievement. It is both a poignant reflection of the human condition and a prominent framing text for classical, medieval, and renaissance theories of human perfectibility. In this unique reading of the myth through classical philosophies, pagan and Christian religious doctrines, and medieval and renaissance literature, we see Sisyphus, "the most cunning of human beings," attempting to transcend his imperfections empowered by his imagination to renew his faith in the infinite potentialities of human excellence."--BOOK JACKET
In Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England, Liz Oakley-Brown considers English versions of the Metamorphoses - a poem concerned with translation and transformation on a multiplicity of levels - as important sites of social and historical difference from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. Through the exploration of a range of canonical and marginal texts, from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus to women's embroideries of Ovidian myths, Oakley-Brown argues that translation is central to the construction of national and gendered identities.
Replete with biographical introduction, discussions of sources and compositional methodology, this two volume work is the first to include all Mary Sidney Herbert's extant works.
Roger Kuin's Chamber Music is a playfully written, imaginative, and ultimately demanding book, with a critical approach characterized by an unusual and indiosynchratic post-modern critical style that will challenge the reader's perceptions of what a book of criticism should and can do. Analysing the sonnet sequences of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare both from an interpretive angle and from the perspective of a post-modern re-evaluation of the Renaissance sonnets, Roger Kuin's discussion is influenced by many modern literary critics, including Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco. Kuin focuses on the problems inherent in the form of the sonnet sequence, emphasizing the various forms of indeterminacy central to their meaning. His sense of the intertextual relationship among the major English sequences is subtle, and in places, strikingly original, in combination with a highly sophisticated understanding of theory. Chamber Music is a book that will infuriate many, but ultimately reward those who flow with its idiosyncratic style towards Roger Kuin's admirable and expert conclusions.
Attending to the importance of context and decorum, this major contribution to Ideas in Context recovers a tradition of free speech that has been obscured in studies of the evolution of universal rights."--BOOK JACKET.
Offers an extremely bold, far-reaching, and unsuspected thesis in the history of philosophy: Aristotelianism was a dominant movement of the British philosophical landscape, especially in the field of logic, and it had a long survival. British Aristotelian doctrines were strongly empiricist in nature, both in the theory of knowledge and in scientific method; this character marked and influenced further developments in British philosophy at the end of the century, and eventually gave rise to what we now call British empiricism, which is represented by philosophers such as John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. Beyond the apparent and explicit criticism of the old Scholastic and Aristoteli...
In Defiance of Time explores the emergence of antiquarianism in early modern England, from its first flourishing in the mid-Tudor period through to its seventeenth-century heyday. A vibrant antiquarian culture emerged, which reached beyond scholarly and historical circles, and had a profound influence on the literature and thought of the period. Examining the influences on that development of that culture, this book argues that the origins of English antiquarianism need to be found in the methods and practices of continental (and especially Italian) humanism. It shows that, like the humanists, the early antiquaries had the essentially imaginative aim of resurrecting and recomposing the past ...
Greco-Roman mythology and its reception are at the heart of the European Renaissance, and mythographies-texts that collected and explained ancient myths-were considered indispensable companions to any reader of literature. Despite the importance of this genre, English mythographies have not gained sustained critical attention, largely because they have been wrongly considered mere copies of their European counterparts. This volume focuses on the English mythographies written between 1577 and 1647 by Stephen Batman, Abraham Fraunce, Francis Bacon, Henry Reynolds, and Alexander Ross: it places their texts into a wider, European context to reveal their unique English take on the genre and also unfolds the significant role myth played in the broader culture of the period, influencing not only literary life, natural philosophy and poetics, but also religious conflicts and Civil War politics. In doing so it demonstrates, for the first time, the considerable explanatory value classical mythology holds for the study of the English Renaissance and its literary culture in particular, and how early modern England answered a question we still find fascinating today: what is myth?