Renaissance Self-Fashioning

by Greenblatt, Stephen J.

• ISBN13: 9780226306599
• ISBN10: 0226306593
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Renaissance Self-Fashioningis a study of sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English RenaissanceMore, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeareand finds that in the early modern period new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily influenced the literature of the era. Now a classic text in literary studies,Renaissance Self-Fashioningcontinues to be of interest to students of the Renaissance, English literature, and the new historicist tradition, and this new edition includes a preface by the author on the book's creation and influence. "No one who has read [Greenblatt's] accounts of More, Tyndale, Wyatt, and others can fail to be moved, as well as enlightened, by an interpretive mode which is as humane and sympathetic as it is analytical. These portraits are poignantly, subtly, and minutely rendered in a beautifully lucid prose alive in every sentence to the ambivalences and complexities of its subjects."Harry Berger Jr., University of California, Santa Cruz

Author Biography

Stephen Greenblatt is the Cogan University Professor of the Humanities in English literature at Harvard University. He is author or editor of numerous books, including, with Catherine Gallagher, Practicing New Historicism published by the University of Chicago Press, and the recent Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
A Note on Texts	x
Preface: Fashioning Renaissance Self-Fashioning	xi
Introduction	1	(10)
1 At the Table of the Great: More's Self-Fashioning and Self-Cancellation	11	(63)
2 The Word of God in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction	74	(41)
3 Power, Sexuality, and Inwardness in Wyatt's Poetry	115	(42)
4 To Fashion a Gentleman: Spenser and the Destruction of the Bower of Bliss	157	(36)
5 Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play	193	(29)
6 The Improvisation of Power	222	(33)
Epilogue	255	(3)
Notes	258	(51)
Index	309