Formal matters: Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719085535 ISBN 13: 9780719085536

Publisher: Manchester University Press, 2013

Synopsis

How do the formal properties of early modern texts, together with the materials that envelop and shape them, relate to the cultural, political, and social world of their production? Formal matters: Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature answers this question by linking formalist analysis with the insights of book history. It thus represents the new English Renaissance literary historiography tying literary composition to the materials and material practices of writing.

The book combines studies of familiar and lesser known texts, from the poems and plays of Shakespeare to jests and printed commonplace books. Its ten studies make important, original contributions to research on the genres of early modern literature, focusing on the involvement of literary forms in the scribal and print cultures of compilation, continuation, translation, and correspondence, as well as in matters of political republicanism and popular piety, among others. Taken together, the collection's essays by Heather James, Matthew Zarnowiecki, Adam Smyth, Jeffrey Todd Knight, Tanya Pollard, Henry S. Turner, Alan Stewart, Amanda Bailey, Peter Lake, Shankar Raman, and an afterword by David Scott Kastan, exemplify how an attention to form and matter can historicise writing without abandoning a literary focus.

About this title

About the Authors

András Kiséry is Assistant Professor of English at The City College of New York, City University of New York

Allison K. Deutermann is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York

From the Back Cover

Formal matters: Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature explores the intersection between literary and material forms of writing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. How do the formal properties of early modern texts, together with the materials that envelop and shape them, relate to the cultural, political, and social world of their production? The essays in this collection answer this question by uniting two distinct, even oppositional, methodologies that have transformed literary studies over the past decade: a renewed interest in formalist analysis and the broad acceptance of the study of the material text as central to the discipline. The present volume shows what is to be gained by linking formalist analysis with the insights of book history, thus representing the new English Renaissance literary historiography that links literary composition to the materials and material practices of writing. Formal matters brings together studies of familiar and lesser known texts, from the poems and plays of Shakespeare to jests and printed commonplace books, and from the works of Philip Sidney and Thomas Middleton to Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations. The ten featured studies make important, original contributions to research on the genres of early modern literature, focusing on the involvement of literary forms in the scribal and print cultures of compilation, continuation, translation, and correspondence, as well as in matters of political republicanism, of popular piety and of geometry, among others. Taken together, the essays in this collection exemplify how an attention to form and matter can historicise writing without abandoning a literary focus.

Edition details

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0719085535
• ISBN 13: 9780719085536
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272
• Editor: Deutermann Allison, Kisery Andras