Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson Laureations

by Lavezzo, Kathy; Hentschell, Roze; Barkan, Leonard; Dolan, Frances; Dubrow, Heather; Duval, Edwin M.; Ferguson, Margaret; Fuchs, Barbara; Fumerton, Patricia; Hadfield, Andrew; Ingham, Patricia Clare; McRae, Andrew; Miller, Shannon; Nohrnberg, James; O'Conn

• ISBN13: 9781611493818
• ISBN10: 1611493811
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-30
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Summary

This book brings together new essays by leading cultural critics who have been influenced by the groundbreaking scholarship of Richard Helgerson. The original essays penned for this anthology evince the ongoing impact of Helgerson's work in major critical debates including national identity, literary careerism, and studies of form. Analyzing not only early modern but also medieval literary texts, the pieces that comprise Laureations respond to both Helgerson's more famous scholarly works and the whole range of his critical corpus, from his earliest work on prodigality to his latest writings on mid-sixteenth century European poets. The interdisciplinary, transnational, and comparativist spirit of Helgerson's criticism is reflected in the essays, as is his commitment to studies of multiple genres that nevertheless attend to the particularities of form. Contributors offer new interpretations of a slew of Shakespeare's plays-Hamlet, I Henry IV, The Tempest, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear-and other dramas such as Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, the anonymous drama The London Prodigal, and Stephen Greenblatt and John Mee's contemporary play Cardenio. In keeping with Helgerson's comparativist turn, the volume includes analyses of Joachim Du Bellay's poetry and Donato Gianotti's literary critical discussion of The Divine Comedy. Prose works featured in the volume encompass More's Utopia and Isaac Walton's The Compleat Angler. Spenser's early poetry and the medieval romance Floris and Blanchflour also receive new readings.

Author Biography

Roze Hentschell is associate professor of English at Colorado State University. Kathy Lavezzo is associate professor of English at the University of Iowa.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. vii
Community, Colonialism, And Nationhood
Influence, Appropriation, Piracy: The Place of Spain in English Literary History	p. 3
Idleness, Humanist Industry, and English Colonial Activity in Thomas More's "fruitfull, pleasant," "wittie" and "profitable" Utopia	p. 19
Amorous Scholastics: The Guilty Pleasures of the Middle English Floris and Blauncheflour	p. 51
Dramatic Forms
Delivery Rooms: Towards a Reconsideration of the Conclusion of The Tempest	p. 73
One Head is Better than Two: The Aphoristic Afterlife of Renaissance Tragedy	p. 91
About Suffering and on Dying: Shakespeare's Reinvention of a Theater of Eschatological Identity in King Lear	p. 111
Travel And Geography
Dante, Michelangelo, and What We Talk about When We Talk about Poetry	p. 145
The Pleasures of the Land in Restoration England: The Social Politics of The Compleat Angler	p. 163
The Literary Career
Rival Laureates and Multiple Monuments: Collaborative Self-Crowning in France	p. 183
Du Bellay's "Source de La Meduse"	p. 205
The Jacobean Prodigals	p. 227
Religious Affiliation in Elizabethan London: Richard Mulcaster, Edmund Spenser, and The Family of Love	p. 243
Afterword Helgersonland	p. 259
A Bibliography	p. 271
Index	p. 275
About the Contributors	p. 285
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