Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature - Softcover

Hiscock, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1107463408 ISBN 13: 9781107463400

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2014

Synopsis

'He who remembers or recollects, thinks' declared Francis Bacon, drawing attention to the absolute centrality of the question of memory in early modern Britain's cultural life. The vigorous debate surrounding the faculty had dated back to Plato at least. However, responding to the powerful influences of an ever-expanding print culture, humanist scholarship, the veneration for the cultural achievements of antiquity, and sweeping political upheaval and religious schism in Europe, succeeding generations of authors from the reign of Henry VIII to that of James I engaged energetically with the spiritual, political and erotic implications of remembering. Treating the works of a host of different writers from the Earl of Surrey, Katharine Parr and John Foxe, to William Shakespeare, Mary Sidney, Ben Jonson and Francis Bacon, this study explores how the question of memory was intimately linked to the politics of faith, identity and intellectual renewal in Tudor and early Stuart Britain.

About this title

Book Description:

Spanning the literary renaissance from the reign of Henry VIII to James I, this study addresses how generations of male and female, courtly and non-courtly writers including Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne and Jonson engaged in the vibrant debate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries concerning the status and function of memory.

About the Author:

Andrew Hiscock is Professor of English at Bangor University, Wales. He teaches and publishes widely on early modern literature in British and European contexts. His earlier monographs include Authority and Desire: Crises of Interpretation in Shakespeare and Racine (1996) and The Uses of this World: Thinking Space in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cary and Jonson (2004). He edited the 2008 Yearbook of English Studies devoted to Tudor literature and his edited critical collection Middleton: Women Beware Women appeared in 2011. He is co-editor of the academic journal English and is about to take up his role as editor (English Literature) of the Modern Language Review and as series editor for the Yearbook of English Studies.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1107463408
• ISBN 13: 9781107463400
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 334