First published in 1971. This collection of essays discusses some of the central works and areas of literature in the Renaissance period of cultural history. Contents include: Spenser and the Allegorists; The Faerie Queene, I and V; The Cave of Mammon; The Banquet of Sense; John Donne; The Patience of Shakespeare; Survival fo the Classic; Shakespeare's Learning; The Mature Comedies; The Final Plays.

First published in 1971. This collection of essays discusses some of the central works and areas of literature in the Renaissance period of cultural history. Contents include: Spenser and the Allegorists; The Faerie Queene, I and V; The Cave of Mammon; The Banquet of Sense; John Donne; The Patience of Shakespeare; Survival fo the Classic; Shakespeare's Learning; The Mature Comedies; The Final Plays.

William Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece and John Donne’s Holy Sonnets are read against the background of concepts of the soul during the early modern period. This approach provides new insights into concepts of interiority and performance as well as a new understanding of the soliloquy in both poetry and drama.

This edited collection of essays, part of The Manchester Spenser series, brings together leading Spenser and Donne scholars to challenge the traditionally dichotomous view of these two major poets and to shift the critical conversation towards a more holistic, relational view of the two authors’ poetics and thought.

Deconstructionist critics have argued that literary works contain conflicting or contradictory meanings, thus creating an aporia, or impasse, that prevents readers from interpreting the work. Here, however, Murray Roston offers detailed and essentially new analyses of works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and Donne, arguing that the seemingly contradictory presence of traditional and subversive elements in their major works actually creates the source of much of their literary achievement. Chapters explore The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Faerie Queene, Volpone, and the Meditations of John Donne, highlighting the creative tension between centripetal and centrifugal factors (borrowing Bakhtin's terms). As Roston demonstrates, this tension exists in a variety of genres, including poetry, epic and drama, and even in religious prose which, he acknowledges, might be thought to be exempt from such inner conflict because of its doctrinal and theological focus. The tension between tradition and subversion, both linguistic and cultural, then, can be seen to produce not aporia in any negative sense, but a positive complexity of response from the audience, animating and profoundly enriching each work. In The Merchant of Venice, for example, Shakespeare merges the previously despised figure of the merchant with a Christ-like figure, brilliantly reasserting the Christian condemnation of profiteering while simultaneously advocating its seeming opposite, a validation of the burgeoning mercantile activity of the Renaissance. Tradition and Subversion in Renaissance Literary Studies is a thoughtful study, rich in both historical scholarship and in its survey of modern criticism. Even those who are quite familiar with the texts discussed here will find Roston's focus on the tension between maintaining the expectations of the culture and pulling toward new ideas an illuminating way to freshly consider these literary works.

This book offers the first full study of the challenges posed to an emerging English nationalism that stemmed from the powerful appeal exerted by the leaders of the international Protestant cause. By considering a range of texts, including poetry, plays, pamphlets, and religious writing, the study reads this heroic tradition as a 'connected literary history,' a project shared by Protestants throughout Northern Europe, which opened up both collaboration among writers from these different regions and new possibilities for communal identification. The work’s central claim is that a pan-Protestant literary field existed in the period, which was multilingual, transnational, and ideologically charged. Celebrated leaders such as William of Orange posed a series of questions, especially for English Protestants, over the relationship between English and Protestant identity. In formulating their role as co-religionists, writers often undercut notions of alterity, rendering early modern conceptions of foreignness especially fluid and erasing national borders.

Becoming a father was the main way that an individual in the English Renaissance could be treated as a full member of the community. Yet patriarchal identity was by no means as secure as is often assumed: when poets invoke the idea of paternity in love poetry and other forms, they are therefore invoking all the anxieties that a culture with contradictory notions of sexuality imposed. This study takes these anxieties seriously, arguing that writers such as Sidney and Spenser deployed images of childbirth to harmonize public and private spheres, to develop a full sense of selfhood in their verse, and even to come to new accommodations between the sexes. Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson, in turn, saw the appeal of the older poets' aims, but resisted their more radical implications. The result is a fiercely personal yet publicly-committed poetry that wouldn't be seen again until the time of the Romantics.