Catullan Consciousness and the Early Modern Lyric in England

Catullan Consciousness and the Early Modern Lyric in England
Author: Jacob Blevins
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

By comparing Catullus to English lyricists of the 16th and early 17th centuries, Jacob Blevins here identifies a common function of the genre: lyric love poetry, he argues, provides the space in which speakers attempt to situate their self-identity among dominate cultural ideologies and individual desires. The intratextual nature of the lyric sequence allows for the constant positioning and repositioning of the lyric subject who must both valorize and reject the cultural ideals on which his relationship and desires should be founded; the poetry represents a process of constructing a self within two conflicting needs. Blevins argues that only in the subjectivity inherent in the lyric genre is this process possible, and that this process is the defining element in successful lyric poetry, whether that of Catullus or of the Renaissance poets Sir Thomas Wyatt, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and John Donne.

Romance for Sale in Early Modern England

Romance for Sale in Early Modern England
Author: Steve Mentz
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780754654698

Steve Mentz provides a comprehensive historicist and formalist account of prose romance, the most important genre of Elizabethan fiction. He explores how authors and publishers of prose fiction in late sixteenth-century England produced books that combined traditional narrative forms with a dynamic new understanding of the relationship between text and audience. Though prose fiction would not dominate English literary culture until the eighteenth century, Mentz demonstrates that the form began to invent itself as a distinct literary kind in England nearly two centuries earlier.

Early Modern Authorship and the Editorial Tradition

Early Modern Authorship and the Editorial Tradition
Author: Aleida Auld
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2023-12-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1003816223

This volume adds a new dimension to authorship studies by linking the editorial tradition to the transformative reception of early modern authors and their works across time. Aleida Auld argues that the editorial tradition provides privileged access to the reception of early modern literature, informing our understanding of certain reconfigurations and sometimes helping to produce them between their time and our own. At stake are reconfigurations of oeuvre and authorship, the relationship between the author and work, the relationship between authors, and the author’s own role in establishing an editorial tradition. Ultimately, this study recognizes that the editorial tradition is a stabilizing force while asserting that it may also be a source of strange and provocative reconceptions of early modern authors and their works in the present day. Scholars and students of early modern literature will benefit from this approach to editing as a form of reception that encompasses all the editorial decisions that are necessary to ‘put forth’ a text.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature
Author: Patrick Cheney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 752
Release: 2015-10-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191077798

The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This second volume covers the years 1558-1660, and explores the reception of the ancient genres and authors in English Renaissance literature, engaging with the major, and many of the minor, writers of the period, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Jonson. Separate chapters examine the Renaissance institutions and contexts which shape the reception of antiquity, and an annotated bibliography provides substantial material for further reading.

Dialogism and Lyric Self-fashioning

Dialogism and Lyric Self-fashioning
Author: Jacob Blevins
Publisher: Associated University Presse
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2008
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9781575911205

"Using Mikhail Bakhtin as a kind of theoretical starting point, this volume of essays investigates the manifestation of such competing "voices" within the tradition of lyric poetry. The lyric subject's understanding of himself/herself - through the very act of speaking/writing - is irrevocably connected, on multiple levels, to the heard and unheard voices of others. No matter how private the voice of the lyric speaker appears to be, nearly every utterance is formed from and then positioned between what others have said or will say. Included here are essays on the classical, medieval, early modern, and modern lyric. Some of the essays in this volume engage Bakhtin "head-on"; others, by focusing explicitly on the construction of the subject through multiple discursive dialogues implicitly bring Bakhtin to bear. These essays engage multiple elements of dialogism, including the convergence of masculine and feminine voices, public and private discourses, intertextuality and the "voices of the past," the dialogue between literature and art, and the always present dialogue between speaker(s) and reader(s)."--BOOK JACKET.

The Impotency Poem from Ancient Latin to Restoration English Literature

The Impotency Poem from Ancient Latin to Restoration English Literature
Author: Hannah Lavery
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2016-03-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317027671

The first book length study of the motif of impotency in poetry from early antiquity through to the late Restoration, this book explores the impotency poem as a recognisable form of poetry in the longer tradition of erotic elegy. Hannah Lavery’s central claim is that the impotency motif is adopted by poets in recognition of its potential to signify satirically through its use as symbol and allegory. By drawing together analysis of works in the tradition, Lavery shows how the impotency motif is used to engage with anxieties as to what it means to enact ’service’ within political and social contexts. She demonstrates that impotency poems can be seen on one level to represent bawdy escapism, but on the other to offer positions of resistance and opposition to social and political concerns contemporary to a particular time. Whilst the link between the 'Imperfect Enjoyment' poems by Ovid and Rochester is well known, Lavery here looks further back to the origins of the concept of male impotency as degradation in the works of earlier Roman poets. This is an important context for considering how the impotency poem then first appears in the French and English vernaculars during the sixteenth century, leading to translations and adaptations throughout the seventeenth century. Lavery's close readings of the poems consider both the nature of the literary form, and the political and social contexts within which the works appear, in order to chart the intertextual development of the impotency poem as a distinct form of writing in the early modern period.

Lyric

Lyric
Author: Scott Brewster
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2009-06-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134363907

Lyric traces the history of the term from its classical origins through the early modern, Romantic and Victorian periods and up to the twentieth century and demonstrates the influence of various definitions of lyric on poetic practice, literature, music and other popular cultural forms.

A Literary History of Latin & English Poetry

A Literary History of Latin & English Poetry
Author: Victoria Moul
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 601
Release: 2022-07-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108135579

Victoria Moul's groundbreaking study uncovers one of the most important features of early modern English poetry: its bilingualism. The first guide to a forgotten literary landscape, this book considers the vast quantities of poetry that were written and read in both Latin and English from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Introducing readers to a host of new authors and drawing on hundreds of manuscript as well as print sources, it also reinterprets a series of landmarks in English poetry within a bilingual literary context. Ranging from Tottel's miscellany to the hymns of Isaac Watts, via Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, Marvell, Milton and Cowley, this revelatory survey shows how the forms and fashions of contemporary Latin verse informed key developments in English poetry. As the complex, highly creative interactions between the two languages are revealed, the work reshapes our understanding of what 'English' literary history means.