The first modernized and fully annotated edition of Puttenham's 1589 text.

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

Controversy raged through England during the 1570-80s as Puritans denounced all manner of games & pastimes as a danger to public morals. Writers quickly turrned their attention to their own art and the first & most influential response came with Philip Sidney's Defense. Here he set out to answer contemporary critics &, with reference to Classical models of criticism, formulated a manifesto for English literature. Also includes George Puttenham's Art of English Poesy, Samuel Daniel's Defence of Rhyme, & passages by writers such as Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon & George Gascoigne.