Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton
Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton
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USDReading literary texts in their historical contexts has been the dominant form of interpretation in literary criticism for the past thirty years. This collection of essays reflects on the origins of historicism and its present usefulness as a mode of literary analysis, its limitations, and its future. The volume provides a brief history of the practice from its renaissance origins, offering examples of historicist work that not only demonstrate the continuing vitality of this methodology but also suggest new directions for research. Focusing on the major figures of Shakespeare and Milton, these essays provide important and concise representations of trends in the field. Designed for scholars and students of early modern English literature (1500–1700), the volume will also be of interest to students of literature more generally and to historians.
- Provides exemplary essays by leading American and British scholars on the practice of historicism
- Covers major issues in scholarship from Erasmus to Milton
- Of broad interest to students and researchers of early modern English literature
Reviews & endorsements
"This rich and timely collection of essays, edited by Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton, comes at a moment when historicism's primacy in the field of early modern literary studies seems somehow at once both more assured and more precarious than ever … Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton stands on multiple levels as a compelling testament to historicism’s enduring worth."
Jeffrey Alan Miller, Milton Quarterly
"This stimulating collection reassesses historicist approaches to Renaissance literature in the wake of New Historicism and in response to challenges from presentist, formalist, and disciplinary quarters."
Mario Digangi, Renaissance Quarterly
Product details
October 2012Adobe eBook Reader
9781139575355
0 pages
0kg
1 b/w illus.
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton
- Part I. Historicism and Its Discontents:
- 1. Has historicism gone too far: or, should we return to form? Andrew Hadfield
- 2. Theory and practice in historical method Michael McKeon
- 3. Limiting history Marshall Grossman
- Part II. Historicism and Theology:
- 4. The politics of Renaissance historicism: Valla, Erasmus, Colet, and more Thomas Fulton
- 5. Historicizing satisfaction in Shakespeare's Othello Heather Hirschfeld
- Part III. Dramatic Histories:
- 6. The new presentism and its discontents: listening to Eastward Ho and Shakespeare's Tempest in dialogue Paul Stevens
- 7. In great men's houses: playing, patronage, and the performance of Tudor history Lawrence Manley
- Part IV. Milton and the Problems of History:
- 8. Medea's dilemma: politics and passion in Milton's divorce tracts Sharon Achinstein
- 9. Milton, Foucault, and the new historicism Martin Dzelzainis
- Part V. Gendering Historicism:
- 10. 'You shall be our generalless': fashioning warrior women from Henrietta Maria to Hillary Clinton Laura Knoppers
- 11. War-times: seventeenth-century women's writing and its afterlives Erin Murphy
- Afterword Nigel Smith.
