Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe's Legacy [Hardcover]

This collection of essays historicizes and theorizes forgetting in English Renaissance literary texts and their cultural contexts. Its essays open up an area of study overlooked by contemporary Renaissance scholarship, which is too often swayed by a critical paradigm devoted to the art of memory. This volume recovers the crucial role of forgetting in producing early modernity's subjective and collective identities, desires and fantasies.

Introduction: Sites of Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture Grant Williams and Christopher Ivic

Part One: Embodiments

1. The Decay of Memory William E. Engel

2. Lethargic Corporeality on and off the Early Modern Stage Garrett A. Sullivan Jr.

3. Pleasure's Oblivion: Displacements of Generation in Spenser's Faerie Queene Elizabeth D. Harvey

Part Two: Signs

4. Textual Crudities in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica Grant Williams

5. Off the Subject: Early Modern Poets on Rhyme, Distraction, and Forgetfulness Amanda Watson

Part Three: Narratives

6. Reassuring Fratricide in 1 Henry IV Christopher Ivic

7. 'The Religion I Was Born In': Forgetting Catholicism and Remembering the King Donne's Devotions David J. Baker

8. Legends of Oblivion: Enchantment and Enslavement in Book Six of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Elizabeth Mazzola