Now available in paperback, this is the first full-scale history of early modern English literature in nearly a century. It offers new perspectives on English literature produced in Britain between the Reformation and the Restoration. While providing the general coverage and specific information expected of a major history, its twenty-six chapters address recent methodological and interpretive developments in English literary studies. The book has five sections: Modes and Means of Literary Production, Circulation, and Reception , The Tudor Era from the Reformation to Elizabeth I , The Era of Elizabeth and James VI , The Earlier Stuart Era , and The Civil War and Commonwealth Era . While England is the principal focus, literary production in Scotland, Ireland and Wales is treated, as are other subjects less frequently examined in previous histories, including women s writings and the literature of the English Reformation and Revolution. This innovatively-designed history is an essential resource for specialists and students.

When we engage with the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, we encounter a culture radically unfamiliar to us at the start of the twenty-first century. The past is a foreign country, and so too are many of its texts. This readable and provocative book seeks to enhance our understanding of early modern literature by recovering the contexts in which it was originally produced and consumed. Taking us back to the courts, theatres and marketplaces of early modern England, Jason Scott-Warren reveals the varied ways in which literary texts dovetailed with everyday experience, unlocking the distinctive social practices, economic structures and modes of behaviour that gave them meaning. He shows how the periods most beguiling writings were conditioned by long-forgotten notions of knowledge, nationhood, sexuality and personal identity. Bringing an anthropologists eye to his materials, he offers richly detailed new readings of works from within and beyond the canon, covering a span that stretches from Erasmus and More to Milton and Behn. Resisting any notion of the period as merely transitional a staging post on the road leading from the medieval to the modern world Scott-Warren reveals the distinctiveness of its literary culture, and equips the reader for fresh encounters with its extraordinary textual legacy. Any undergraduate student of the period will find it an essential guide, while scholars will find its fresh approach invigorating.

This book traces the process through which authors like Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton adapted, rewrote, or resisted romance, mapping a world in which new cross-cultural contacts and religious conflicts demanded a rethinking of some of the most fundamental terms of early modern identity.

Early modern printed books are copiously illustrated with charts, diagrams, and other kinds of images that represent systems of thought and ways of doing things. Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature shows how these images fostered what Elizabeth Eisenstein called brainwork related to concepts of space, truth, art, and nature, and reveals their importance to poetry by Andrew Marvell and John Milton, and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. The genres of illustration considered in this book include military strategy and tactics, garden design, instrumentation, Bibles, scientific schema, drawing instruction, natural history, comparative anatomy, and Aesop’s Fables. The argument produces unique insights into the ways in which visual rhetoric affected verbal expression, and the book develops novel methods of using printed images as evidence in the interpretation of the rich, strange, and beautiful literature of early modern England.

The stigma of haste pervaded early modern English culture, more so than the so-called stigma of print. The period’s writers were perpetually short on time, but what does it mean for authors to present themselves as hasty or slow, or to characterize others similarly? This book argues that such classifications were a way to define literary value. To be hasty was, in a sense, to be irresponsible, but, in another sense, it signaled a necessary practicality. Expressions of haste revealed a deep conflict between the ideal of slow writing in classical and humanist rhetoric and the sometimes grim reality of fast printing. Indeed, the history of print is a history of haste, which carries with it a particular set of modern anxieties that are difficult to understand in the absence of an interdisciplinary approach. Many previous studies have concentrated on the period’s competing definitions of time and on the obsession with how to use time well. Other studies have considered time as a notable literary theme. This book is the first to connect ideas of time to writerly haste in a richly interdisciplinary manner, drawing upon rhetorical theory, book history, poetics, religious studies and early modern moral philosophy, which, only when taken together, provide a genuinely deep understanding of why the stigma of haste so preoccupied the early modern mind. The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature surveys the period from ca 1580 to ca 1730, with special emphasis on the seventeenth century. The material discussed is found in emblem books, devotional literature, philosophical works, and collections of poetry, drama and romance. Among classical sources, Horace and Quintilian are especially important. The main authors considered are: Robert Parsons; Edmund Bunny; King James 1; Henry Peacham; Thomas Nash; Robert Greene; Ben Jonson; Margaret Cavendish; John Dryden; Richard Baxter; Jonathan Swift; Alexander Pope. By studying these writers’ expressions of time and haste, we may gain a better understanding of how authorship was defined at a time when the book industry was gradually taking the place of classical rhetoric in regulating writers’ activities.

Dowd investigates literature's engagement with the gendered conflicts of early modern England by examining the narratives that seventeenth-century dramatists created to describe the lives of working women.

In this timely new study, Borlik reveals the surprisingly rich potential for the emergent "green" criticism to yield fresh insights into early modern English literature. Deftly avoiding the anachronistic casting of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors as modern environmentalists, he argues that environmental issues, such as nature’s personhood, deforestation, energy use, air quality, climate change, and animal sentience, are formative concerns in many early modern texts. The readings infuse a new urgency in familiar works by Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Ralegh, Jonson, Donne, and Milton. At the same time, the book forecasts how ecocriticism will bolster the reputation of less canonical authors like Drayton, Wroth, Bruno, Gascoigne, and Cavendish. Its chapters trace provocative affinities between topics such as Pythagorean ecology and the Gaia hypothesis, Ovidian tropes and green phenomenology, the disenchantment of Nature and the Little Ice Age, and early modern pastoral poetry and modern environmental ethics. It also examines the ecological onus of Renaissance poetics, while showcasing how the Elizabethans’ sense of a sophisticated interplay between nature and art can provide a precedent for ecocriticism’s current understanding of the relationship between nature and culture as "mutually constructive." Situating plays and poems alongside an eclectic array of secondary sources, including herbals, forestry laws, husbandry manuals, almanacs, and philosophical treatises on politics and ethics, Borlik demonstrates that Elizabethan and Jacobean authors were very much aware of, and concerned about, the impact of human beings on their natural surroundings.