Redefining Elizabethan Literature [Hardcover]

A wide-ranging study of the development of the concept of literature and authorship in late Elizabethan culture.Redefining Elizabethan Literature explores one of the most remarkable decades in English literary history, the 1590s, focusing on the changing percep tions of the aesthetic as a sphere of activity in its own right. Georgia Brown uncovers how the period's obsession with shame was expressed in fragmentary and marginal literary forms such as the sonnet sequence, epyllion and complaint. Combining theoretical perspectives with close attention to the structure of a very wide range of Elizabethan texts, Brown analyses the historical and ideological forces inscribed in rhetorical and formal developments.Redefining Elizabethan Literature explores one of the most remarkable decades in English literary history, the 1590s, focusing on the changing percep tions of the aesthetic as a sphere of activity in its own right. Georgia Brown uncovers how the period's obsession with shame was expressed in fragmentary and marginal literary forms such as the sonnet sequence, epyllion and complaint. Combining theoretical perspectives with close attention to the structure of a very wide range of Elizabethan texts, Brown analyses the historical and ideological forces inscribed in rhetorical and formal developments.Exploring one of the most remarkable decades in English literary history, the 1590s, Georgia Brown focuses on the changing perceptions of the aesthetic. Brown reveals how the period's obsession with shame was expressed in fragmentary and marginal literary forms such as the sonnet sequence, epyllion and complaint. Combining theoretical perspectives with structural analysis, she studies the historical and ideological forces inscribed in rhetorical and formal developments.1. Introduction; 2. Generating waste: Thomas Nashe and the production of professional authorship; 3. Literature as fetish; 4. Shame and the subject of history; Epilogue; Bibliography. The bibliography is subslã‹