Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare - Softcover

Greenblatt, Professor Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226306542 ISBN 13: 9780226306544

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1983

Synopsis

Renaissance Self-Fashioning is a study of sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance—More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare—and finds that in the early modern period new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily influenced the literature of the era. Now a classic text in literary studies, Renaissance Self-Fashioning continues to be of interest to students of the Renaissance, English literature, and the new historicist tradition, and this new edition includes a preface by the author on the book's creation and influence.

"No one who has read [Greenblatt's] accounts of More, Tyndale, Wyatt, and others can fail to be moved, as well as enlightened, by an interpretive mode which is as humane and sympathetic as it is analytical. These portraits are poignantly, subtly, and minutely rendered in a beautifully lucid prose alive in every sentence to the ambivalences and complexities of its subjects."—Harry Berger Jr., University of California, Santa Cruz

About this title

About the Author:

Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of many books, including Hamlet in Purgatory, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

 

Review:

"One day we were teaching Renaissance literature to small groups of somewhat bored students, the next "Renaissance Self-Fashioning "had appeared, and suddenly studying the Renaissance was all the rage, exciting and new. Stephen Greenblatt's book entirely altered the critical landscape-showing with compelling lucidity that social anthropology and psychoanalysis were essential tools for understanding Renaissance writing. I can't think of any other critical work since T. S. Eliot to have made that kind of impact."

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1983
• ISBN 10: 0226306542
• ISBN 13: 9780226306544
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 332