Perspectives on Renaissance Poetry [Hardcover]

Introducing students to the full range of approaches to the study of Renaissance poetry that they are likely to encounter in their course of study, Perspectives on Renaissance Poetry is an authoritative and accessible guide to the verse of the Early Modern period. Each chapter covers a major figure in Early Modern poetry and explores two different poems from a full range of theoretical perspectives, including:

- Classical
- Formalist
- Psychoanalytic
- Marxist
- Structuralist
- Reader-response
- New Historicist
- Ecocritical
- Multicultural

Poets covered include: Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Anne Vaughan Lock, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Aemilia Lanyer, Martha Moulsworth, Lady Mary Wroth, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell, John Milton and Katherine Philips.

This primer in applied critical theory bridges the gap between early modern English poetry and various analytical approaches to literature. It is more focused than other introductory guides to criticism, such as Wilfred Guerin???sHandbook of Critical Approaches to Literature (1966; 2nd., 1979)and Charles Bressler???sLiterary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice.Evans (English and philosophy, Auburn Univ., Montgomery) offers paragraph-length summaries of 20 critical methodologies and demonstrates, in chapter-length discussions, how they elucidate some 30 Renaissance poems by writers from Wyatt to Milton (included are several poems by Emilia Lanier, Anne Vaughn Lock, and Lady Mary Wroth). Evans???s style is direct and accessible but never simplistic. Not every method is applied to every text (one misses a psychoanalytic reading of Donne???s ???Flea??? and ???Holy Sonnet 14???), but Evans succeeds in showing how early modern texts might respond to a variety of reading approaches. Specialists may find the book???s design somewhat schematic, bl3”