The Forms of Renaissance Thought New Essays in Literature and Culture [Hardcover]

This book addresses works of the European Renaissance as they relate both to the world of their origins and to a modern culture that turns to the early moderns for methodological provocation and renewal. It charts the most important developments in the field since the turn towards cultural and ideological features of the Renaissance imagination.Notes on Contributors Introduction: 'The Form of Things Unknown': Renaissance Studies in a New Millennium PART ONE: RECEPTION, RENOVATION, RENAISSANCE Praxiteles' Aphrodite and the Love of Art; L.Barkan English Literature in its Golden Age; S.Keilen Translating for Queen Anne: John Florio's Decameron ; M.Wyatt The First Reader of Shake-speares Sonnets ; M.de Grazia PART TWO: DESIRE AND THE BODY The Play of Wanton Parts; J.Goldberg Shakespeare's Narcissus, Sonnet's Echo; B.Cormack Coriolanus : The Rhythms and Remains of Excess; P.Holland The Joys of Martha Joyless: Queer Pedagogy and the (Early Modern) Production of Sexual Knowledge; V.Traub PART THREE: MATERIAL CULTURES Bearded Ladies in Shakespeare; A.R.Braunmuller Shakespeare in Leather; A.Bosman Digging the Dust: Renaissance Archivology; W.Sherman Of Busks and Bodies; A.R.Jones& P.Stallybrass Index

'This impressive collection of essays positions itself at the forefront of early modern literary studies, at the boundary between the new historicism and other recent studies of cross-disciplinary influence. The notion of 'form' as poised ambiguously between freedom and determination, between the external and outward on the one hand and the essential and inherently inward on the other, is essential to the enterprise. Form is a relationship between producer and consumer, making the composition and transmission of thought possible by shaping what can be said in political, social, and literary discourse. This collection of essays brilliantly encourages and deepens such a cross-disciplinary approach. This is a book not to miss.' - David Bevington, University of Chicago&llƒ!