Abstract:An assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of the English Renaissance and some general observations on the state of the profession. A full bibliography and price list of the works received by SEL for consideration follow.
“…At the same time, other developments have emerged in resistance to the new materialism: certain “new” forms of aesthetic, ethical, and formal criticism resist the allure of the new materialism's claim that evidentiary authority ultimately resides in materiality . The conflict between these approaches is evident in John Watkins’ recent call to rededicate Renaissance scholarship to the material archive. Though presumably writing about scholarship on non‐dramatic literature, Watkins’ example is a dramatic text, and his comments reflect the tension in Shakespeare studies well: Several recent SEL reviewers have called for greater attention to literary form.…”
“Materialism,” “materiality,” and “material culture” have become key terms in early modern studies and Shakespeare scholarship over the past two decades. Responding to perceived subjective shortcomings of the New Historicism and Cultural Materialism of the 1980s and early 90s, “new materialist” approaches have emerged in scholarship ranging from Book History and textual studies to affect theory and ecocriticism. This article reviews the debates over this materialist emphasis and points to new directions that Shakespeare studies might take, not in a return to idealism, but beyond the dichotomy between subject and object, mind and body, material and immaterial.
“…At the same time, other developments have emerged in resistance to the new materialism: certain “new” forms of aesthetic, ethical, and formal criticism resist the allure of the new materialism's claim that evidentiary authority ultimately resides in materiality . The conflict between these approaches is evident in John Watkins’ recent call to rededicate Renaissance scholarship to the material archive. Though presumably writing about scholarship on non‐dramatic literature, Watkins’ example is a dramatic text, and his comments reflect the tension in Shakespeare studies well: Several recent SEL reviewers have called for greater attention to literary form.…”
“Materialism,” “materiality,” and “material culture” have become key terms in early modern studies and Shakespeare scholarship over the past two decades. Responding to perceived subjective shortcomings of the New Historicism and Cultural Materialism of the 1980s and early 90s, “new materialist” approaches have emerged in scholarship ranging from Book History and textual studies to affect theory and ecocriticism. This article reviews the debates over this materialist emphasis and points to new directions that Shakespeare studies might take, not in a return to idealism, but beyond the dichotomy between subject and object, mind and body, material and immaterial.
This essay explores the vernacular genealogies behind the rhetorical interlacement of disease, desire, and poverty in the sonnets of Robert Sidney, with references to Shakespeare’s sonnets; and it considers the implications of bringing the medieval languages of poetic selfhood to bear on our interpretation of Renaissance texts. I argue that Sidney’s figural alignment of bodily sickness, pecuniary lack, and unrequited desire contains traces of medieval English begging poetry—namely the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve. Consequently, the essay raises questions about the relationship between early modern Petrarchan poetry—a Renaissance discourse par excellence—and the discursive structures and forms of subjectivity found in English medieval poetry, problematizing traditional accounts of English literary history.
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