Literature

Renaissance Literature

Lies Like Truth: Shakespeare, Macbeth, and the Cultural Moment

Arthur F. Kinney

Examining the cultural practices and beliefs that influenced Shakespeare’s writing of Macbeth, Kinney reconstructs how playgoers in 1606 understood that drama when it was first presented.

Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I

Edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier

Sixteen leading scholars explore the richness of King James’s work from a variety of perspectives, and in so doing seek to establish monarchic writing as an important genre in its own right.

Temperate Conquests: Spenser and the Spanish New World

David Read

An examination of Book 2 of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen within the context of England’s international relations and colonial expansion during the Elizabethan period.

In Small Proportions: A Poetics of the English Ayre, 1596–1622

Daniel Fischlin

A study of the literary devices and attributes of the English ayre and English Renaissance lyric.

Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne

Ronald Corthell

A reconsideration of Donne’s poetry in the context of new historicist, psychoanalytic, and feminist work on the subject and subjectivity.

The Major Latin Poems of Jacopo Sannazaro

Translated into English prose with commentary and selected verse translations by Ralph Nash

Beyond making available in English the important work of a major Neo-Latin poet, this book provides provocative material for those interested in the development of English poetry.