New Essays on History and Form in Early Modern English Literature

Its chapters framed by the editors' deeply researched introduction and theorist Caroline Levine's reflective afterword model both theoretical analysis and close reading of drama, lyric, and prose polemic, while encompassing generic, metrical, rhetorical, and logical forms.

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.

Autorentext

Gail Kern Paster is Director Emerita of the Folger Shakespeare Library and Editor Emerita of Shakespeare Quarterly. Her publications include The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (1993) and Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (2004). She was named to the Queen's Honours List in 2011.

Nick Moschovakis has published on early modern English literaure in scholarly journals and in edited collectionsincluding Shakespeare and Historical Formalism, ed. Stephen Cohen (2007)and is an editor of two prior volumes of Shakespearean criticism. Employed mainly as a writing instructor and consultant to international organizations, he has also taught literature and academic writing at several colleges and universities, including most recently the American University of Paris. From 20152019 he served on Shakespeare Quarterly's Editorial Board.

Klappentext

Its chapters framed by the editors' deeply researched introduction and theorist Caroline Levine's reflective afterword model both theoretical analysis and close reading of drama, lyric, and prose polemic, while encompassing generic, metrical, rhetorical, and logical forms.

Inhalt

List of contributors
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Form, History, and Value

Nick Moschovakis and Gail Kern Paster

1. Formless

Douglas Bruster

2. Fictionalizing Place on the Shakespearean Stage

Benedict S. Robinson

3. Genre as Sign in John Milton's Samson Agonistes

Daniel Allen Shore

4. Logical Form and the History of Divorce: Adriana's Speech on Marriage in The Comedy of Errors

Nick Moschovakis

5. Conforming to Authority: The Summe and Substance and Satiric Expression in the Early Stuart Era

Joseph Navitsky

6. Stand Still, You Ever-Moving Spheres of Heaven: Form and Feeling in Dramatic Apostrophe

Gail Kern Paster

7. A Madrigal of Procreation: Intermedial Balletts and the Renaissance English Theater

Jennifer Linhart Wood

8. Form and Knowledge in "Love"

Richard Strier

Afterword

Caroline Levine

Index