William Davenant’s The Platonic Lovers

William Davenant’s The Platonic Lovers
Author: Wendell W. Broom
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2019-05-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429682557

First published in 1987, this 23rd volume in the Renaissance Imagination series had the objective of establishing the text of William Davenant’s The Platonick Lovers that most closely represents the author’s final vision for his work. Wendell W. Broom Jr documents the history of the publication of The Platonick Lovers and the manner in which the present text was produced. Copies of all relevant editions have been collated and curated to bring together the definitive authorial version of the text.

Restoration Shakespeare

Restoration Shakespeare
Author: Barbara A. Murray
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2001
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838639184

Between 1660 and 1682 seventeen versions of Shakespeare's plays were made for the newly reopened public theatres in London, and in its three parts 'Restoration Shakespeare: Viewing the Voice' offers a new view of why and how such adaptation was undertaken. Part I considers the seventeenth-century debate about how dramaric poetry works on the mind. Part II offers an analysis of each play with regard to its visual and metaphorical effects. Part III concludes with a review of Shakespeare's reputation in these years, drawing a distinction between what readers and playgoers would have known of him.

The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre

The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre
Author: Deborah Payne Fisk
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2000-05-11
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780521588126

Fourteen specially commissioned essays provide essential information about staging, playwrights, themes and genres in the drama of the Restoration.

The Writing of Royalism 1628-1660

The Writing of Royalism 1628-1660
Author: Robert Wilcher
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521661836

In The Writing of Royalism, Robert Wilcher charts the political and ideological development of 'royalism' between 1628 and 1660. His study of the literature and propaganda produced by those who adhered to the crown during the civil wars and their aftermath takes in many kinds of writing to provide a comprehensive account of the emergence of a partisan literature in support of the English monarchy and Church. Wilcher situates a wide range of minor and canonical texts in the tumultuous political contexts of the time, helpfully integrating them into a detailed historical narrative. He illustrates the role of literature in forging a party committed to the military defence of royalist values and determined to sustain them in defeat. The Writing of Royalism casts light on the complex phenomenon of 'royalism' by making available a wealth of material that should be of interest to historians as well as literary scholars.

An Empire Nowhere

An Empire Nowhere
Author: Jeffrey Knapp
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0520310977

What caused England's literary renaissance? One answer has been such unprecedented developments as the European discovery of America. Yet England in the sixteenth century was far from an expanding nation. Not only did the Tudors lose England's sole remaining possessions on the Continent and, thanks to the Reformation, grow spiritually divided from the Continent as well, but every one of their attempts to colonize the New World actually failed. Jeffrey Knapp accounts for this strange combination of literary expansion and national isolation by showing how the English made a virtue of their increasing insularity. Ranging across a wide array of literary and extraliterary sources, Knapp argues that English poets rejected the worldly acquisitiveness of an empire like Spain's and took pride in England's material limitations as a sign of its spiritual strength. In the imaginary worlds of such fictions as Utopia, The Faerie Queene, and The Tempest, they sought a grander empire, founded on the "otherworldly" virtues of both England and poetry itself. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature

The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature
Author: David Scott Kastan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 2648
Release: 2006-03-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0195169212

From folk ballads to film scripts, this new five-volume encyclopedia covers the entire history of British literature from the seventh century to the present, focusing on the writers and the major texts of what are now the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In five hundred substantial essays written by major scholars, the Encyclopedia of British Literature includes biographies of nearly four hundred individual authors and a hundred topical essays with detailed analyses of particular themes, movements, genres, and institutions whose impact upon the writing or the reading of literature was significant.An ideal companion to The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, this set will prove invaluable for students, scholars, and general readers.For more information, including a complete table of contents and list of contributors, please visit www.oup.com/us/ebl

Sir John Denham (1614/15-1669) Reassessed

Sir John Denham (1614/15-1669) Reassessed
Author: Philip Major
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2016-05-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317054679

Sir John Denham (1614/15–1669) Reassessed shines new light on a singular, colourful yet elusive figure of seventeenth-century English letters. Despite his influence as a poet, wit, courtier, exile, politician and surveyor of the king's works, Denham, remains a neglected figure. The original essays in this interdisciplinary collection provide the sustained modern critical attention his life and work merit. The book both examines for the first time and reassesses important features of Denham's life and reputations: his friendship circles, his role as a political satirist, his religious inclinations, his playwriting years, and the personal, political and literary repercussions of his long exile; and offers fresh interpretations of his poetic magnum opus, Coopers Hill. Building on the recent resurgence of scholarly interest in royalists and royalism, as well as on Restoration literature and drama, this lively account of Denham's influence questions assumptions about neatly demarcated seventeenth-century chronological, geographic and literary boundaries. What emerges is a complex man who subverts as well as reinforces conventional characterisations of court wit, gambler and dilettante.

Clarendon and the Rhetoric of Historical Form

Clarendon and the Rhetoric of Historical Form
Author: Martine Watson Brownley
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2016-11-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1512803987

Clarendon and the Rhetoric of Historical Form is the first major evaluation from a literary point of view of the writings of Edward Hyde, the first Earl of Clarendon and the most important English historiographer of the seventeenth century. As an early reformer in the Long Parliament, as an adviser to Charles I and Charles II, as the major architect of the Restoration on the Royalist side, and as Lord Chancellor of England from 1660 to 1667, Clarendon played a crucial role in determining the course of English history during and after the tumultuous years of the civil wars. As a historian and a literary stylist, he produced the History of the Rebellion, generally regarded as the greatest historical work written in England during the seventeenth century. Martine Watson Brownley evaluates Clarendon's literary abilities and achievements, focusing on his prose style, narrative form, and thematic structure on biographical influences on his writing; and on his literary background and associations. She also places Clarendon in the context of the development of English literary historiography during the seventeenth century. Various political and literary changes—for example, the antiquarian movement, the civil wars, and alterations in English prose and narrative styles—made the seventeenth century a particularly crucial era in the evolution of an English historiography that would lead to historical works which were also classics of literature. Brownley demonstrates that, through his experiments in style and structure in the History of the Rebellion, and particularly through the imaginative overview which he evolved for and in his work, Clarendon made the most significant advances in English literary historiography before the late eighteenth-century triumvirate of Gibbon, Robertson, and Hume. Clarendon and the Rhetoric of Historical Form will be valuable to scholars interested in historiography, prose and narrative style, and seventeenth-century literature and history.