The Forms of Renaissance Thought New Essays in Literature and Culture

by Barkan, Leonard; Cormack, Bradin; Keilen, Sean

• ISBN13: 9780230008984
• ISBN10: 0230008984
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-01-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The boundaries separating Literary Studies from other kinds of humanistic inquiry are more permeable now than at any moment since the Enlightenment, when disciplinary categories began to acquire their modern definition. The Forms of Renaissance Thought celebrates scholarship at a number of these frontiers. The contributors address works of the European Renaissance as they relate both to the textured world of their origins and to a modern scholarly culture that turns to the early moderns for methodological provocation and renewal. In this way, the volume charts the most important developments in the field since the turn towards cultural and ideological features of the Renaissance imagination.

Author Biography

LEONARD BARKAN teaches in the Comparative Literature Department at Princeton University. His most recent books are Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture and Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome. BRADIN CORMACK teaches in the English Department at the University of Chicago. In addition to essays on drama and poetry, he is author of A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509-1625 and co-author of Book Use, Book Theory: 1500-1700. SEAN KEILEN, a fellow of the National Humanities Center, USA, is the author of Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature and essays about antiquarianism, mythography, and the classical tradition. He is also co-editor of Shakespeare: The Critical Complex.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
"The Form of Things Unknown": Renaissance Studies in a New Millennium	p. 1
Reception, Renovation, Renaissance	p. 13
Praxiteles' Aphrodite and the Love of Art	p. 15
English Literature in its Golden Age	p. 46
Translating for Queen Anne: John Florio's Decameron	p. 75
The First Reader of Shake-speares Sonnets	p. 86
Desire and the Disorganized Body	p. 107
The Play of Wanton Parts	p. 109
Shakespeare's Narcissus, Sonnet's Echo	p. 127
Coriolanus: The Rhythms and Remains of Excess	p. 150
The Joys of Martha Joyless: Queer Pedagogy and the (Early Modern) Production of Sexual Knowledge	p. 170
Intimate Matters	p. 199
Bearded Ladies in Shakespeare	p. 201
Shakespeare in Leather	p. 225
Digging the Dust: Renaissance Archivology	p. 246
Of Busks and Bodies	p. 261
Index	p. 277
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