An essay examining the history of literary criticism in the Renaissance, with a focus on the sixteenth century. Divided into three sections devoted to: Italian criticism from Dante to Tasso, French criticism from Du Bellay to Boileau, and English criticism from Ascham to Milton.

This wide-ranging compilation of texts illustrates clearly the wide variety of criticism of English literature on offer during the Renaissance period by numerous critics.

The Historical Renaissance both exemplifies and examines the most influential current in contemporary studies of the English Renaissance: the effort to analyze the interplay between literature, history, and politics. The broad and varied manifestations of that effort are reflected in the scope of this collection. Rather than merely providing a sampler of any single critical movement, The Historical Renaissance represents the range of ways scholars and critics are fusing what many would once have distinguished as "literary" and "historical" concerns The volume includes studies of mid-Tudor culture as well as of Elizabethan and Stuart periods. The scope of the collection is also manifest in its list of contributors. They include historians and literary critics, and their work spans he spectrum from more traditional methods to those characteristic of what has been termed "New Historicism."One aim of the book is to investigate the apparent division between these older and more current approaches. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier evaluate the contemporary interest in historical studies of the Renaissance, relating it to previous developments in the field, surveying its achievements and limitations, and suggesting new directions for future work.

The author traces the course of literary criticism from its foundations in classical and medieval precepts to the theorising of the present day. He explores the texts which have been milestones in the history of critical thought, placing them firmly in the context of their time.

The turn of the seventeenth century was an important moment in the history of English criticism. In a series of pioneering works of rhetoric and poetics, writers such as Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, and Ben Jonson laid the foundations of critical discourse in English, and the English word "critic" began, for the first time, to suggest expertise in literary judgment. Yet the conspicuously ambivalent attitude of these critics toward criticism—and the persistent fear that they would be misunderstood, marginalized, scapegoated, or otherwise "branded with the dignity of a critic"—suggests that the position of the critic in this period was uncertain. In Inventing the Critic in Renaissance England, William Russell reveals that the critics of the English Renaissance did not passively absorb their practice from Continental and classical sources but actively invented it in response to a confluence of social and intellectual factors. Distributed for UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Unlike other introductions to literary theory, this distinctive book offers a sustained discussion of a specific period of English literature. Avoiding the danger of employing theories as templates, the author uses Renaissance drama and contemporary theory to question and illuminate each other. It provides a comprehensive account of key modern literary theories and presents detailed applications of them to a wide range of Renaissance plays. It also offers a new way of thinking about the relationship of modern literary theory to its main predecessor, humanism. Finally, it writes a history, which Renaissance drama and modern theory are seen as sharing, of the antagonisms and attempted reconciliations between signs and psyche, objects and subjects, history and self, and language and the human.

This 1999 volume was the first to explore as part of an unbroken continuum the critical legacy both of the humanist rediscovery of ancient learning and of its neoclassical reformulation. Focused on what is arguably the most complex phase in the transmission of the Western literary-critical heritage, the book encompasses those issues that helped shape the way European writers thought about literature from the late Middle Ages to the late seventeenth century. These issues touched almost every facet of Western intellectual endeavour, as well as the historical, cultural, social, scientific, and technological contexts in which that activity evolved. From the interpretative reassessment of the major ancient poetic texts, this volume addresses the emergence of the literary critic in Europe by exploring poetics, prose fiction, contexts of criticism, neoclassicism, and national developments. Sixty-one chapters by internationally respected scholars are supported by an introduction, detailed bibliographies for further investigation and a full index.