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Doctor, linguist, scientist, natural historian, and writer of what is probably the most remarkable prose in the English language, Sir Thomas Browne was a virtuoso in learning whose many interests form a representative portrait of his age. To understand the period which we more usually refer to as the Civil War, the Restoration, or the Scientific Revolution, we need to understand parts of the intellectual and spiritual background that are often neglected and which Browne magnificently figures forth. This collection of essays about all aspects of Thomas Browne's work and thought is the first such volume to appear in 25 years. It offers the specialist and the student a wide-ranging array of essays by an international team of leading scholars in seventeenth-century literary studies who extend our understanding of this extremely influential and representative early-modern polymath by embracing recent developments in the field, including literary-scientific relations, the development of Anglican spirituality, civil networks of intellectual exchange, the rise of antiquarianism, and Browne's own legacy in modern literature.
Directs scholarly focus towards a deeper appreciation of medievalist trends in the Elizabethan literary landscape and challenges traditional narratives of 'modernity'. Themes and motifs from the Middle Ages are found across the drama, poetry, prose fiction, polemic, and satire of the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, but their impact and influence on this literary landscape have rarely been considered. This study offers a nuanced examination of this intricate interplay between pre-Reformation culture and its post-Reformation reception in England. Each chapter explores a particular genre or aspect of medievalism at play in this writing: civic medievalism; literary adaptation and sa...
Studies the extent to which seventeenth-century devotional poetry moves beyond specific confessional and ecclesiastical frameworks, and argues that John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and John Milton turned to verse to articulate a radical idea of religious devotion as distinct from the established church.
This study punctures the stereotyped portrayals of Marlowe, first created by his rival Robert Greene, and, yet, which still colour our view. In doing so, Ide reveals the social and cultural discourses out of which such myths emerged. We know next to nothing about the life of the playwright Christopher Marlowe (b.1564 - d. 1593). Few documents survive other than his birth record in the parish register, a handful of legal cases in court records, Privy Council mandates and reports to the Council, the coroner's examination of his death, and a few hearsay accounts of his atheism. With such a limited collection of biographical documents available, it is impossible to retrieve from history a comple...
The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature features original essays exploring the automaton-from animated statue to anthropomorphized machine-in the poetry, prose, and drama of England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Addressing the history and significance of the living machine in early modern literature, the collection places literary automata of the period within their larger aesthetic, historical, philosophical, and scientific contexts. While no single theory or perspective conscribes the volume, taken as a whole the collection helps correct an assumption that frequently emerges from a post-Enlightenment perspective: that these animated beings are by definition exemplars of the new s...
Vol. 1- includes section "Biblia, devoted to the interests of the Friends of the Princeton Library," v. 11-
Over 400 letters that are as entertaining as they are erudite, revealing the fierce and complicated intellect of one of the most popular American poets and novelists of the 20th century. Written between 1943 and Dickey's death in 1997, most of them deal with literature, particularly poetry; the recipients include Robert Penn Warren, Ezra Pound, William Styron, Richard Wilbur, Stanley Burnshaw, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, John Berryman, Andrew Lytle, Denise Levertov, Peter Viereck, Philip Booth, Anne Sexton. Of particular interest are the apprenticeship letters in which the young poet develops contacts and shapes a career; and the late period in which the ailing man of letters confronts his guilt and debilitation as well as various family tragedies.