1st Edition

Reading the Renaissance Culture, Poetics, and Drama

Edited By Jonathan Hart Copyright 1996
    304 Pages
    by Routledge

    300 Pages
    by Routledge

    Approaching the Renaissance from many perspectives-historicism, genre studies, close reading, anthropology, feminism, new historicism, cultural materialism and postmodernism-these original essays explore the boundaries between genre and gender, languages and literatures, reading and criticism, the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, the early modern and the post-modern, world and theater. They offer a new way of looking at the Renaissance and at literature and history generally-through the lens of cultural pluralism, which reflects the changing nature of Western society. The collection reveals that the study of literature should take into account its cultural context and that it is enriched by an examination of other literatures.

    Reading the Renaissance: An Introduction, The Text, the Reader, and the Self, Ritual and Text in the Renaissance, Reading in the French Renaissance: Textual Communities, Boredom, Privacy, Reading Ultima Verba: Commemoration and Friendship in Montaigne's Writing, Gender and Genre, Gender Ideologies, Women Writers, and the Problem of Patronage in Early Modern Italy and France: Issues and Frameworks, Female Transvestism and Male Self-Fashioning in As You Like It and La vida es sueño, Continuities and Discontinuities, The Ends of Renaissance Comedy, Troilus and Cressida: Voices in the Darkness of Troy, Two Tents on Bosworth Field: Richard III V.iii, iv, v, As They Did in the Golden World: Romantic Rapture and Semantic Rupture in As You Like It, Anticipations, Noble Deeds and the Secret Singularity: Hamlet and Phèdre, Narrative and Theatre: From Manuel Puig to Lope de Vega, Notes, Works Cited, Contributors, Index

    Biography

    Jonathan Hart has been a Visiting Fellow or Visiting Scholar at Toronto, Harvard, and Cambridge. His books include Theater and World: The Problematics of Shakespeare's History (1992), Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination (1994), and (edited with Richard Bauman) Explorations in Difference: Law, Culture and Politics (1995).

    "Graduate students and faculty need to have this volume on hand." -- Choice