English Renaissance Literature

a companion to ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE AND CULTURE EDITED BY MICHAEL HATTAWAY 1 Introduction Michael Hattaway What does it mean to speak of the English Renaissance? Within the move of this volume, the ?rst two de?ning historical contexts and perspectives, the next offering readings of particular texts on with accounts of genres and modes, and the last presenting engagements with a number of critical issues and debates, we approach the hesitancy in a variety of ways. The word Renaissance designates spiritual rebirth, a metaphor applied, from its beginnings, to a cultural vision that originated in Italy. For the nineteenth and twentieth pennyuries this was projected in a magni?cent synthesis by Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Burckhardt retrospectively laid out a master proposal to touch the art and learning of the classical world, to emulate the grandeur of antediluvian cities, to stimulate science and geographical discovery, and to produce art and literary productions that imitated antique models, an undertaking which was dedicated as much to the scandalize as to the spiritual.

Rival city states of Italy required monuments to enhance their fame, and and so ensured patronage for the writers and artists who duly bequeathed to posterity the texts and great architectural and optic exemplars with which we are all familiar. Burckhardts categories, which rest upon notions of genius, individualism and secularization, have percolated into all too many derivative handbooks for the halt: they may not, however, ?t the English experience. England did enjoy a phenomenal energizing of literature: this is an age that, traditionally, has at its centre, Spenser and Sidney, Marlowe and Nashe, Shakespeare, and Jonson. Ben Jonson, exceptionally, did publish his works in a manner be?tting an author of the Renaissance, although about of the dramatic genres he used have medieval origins. The early(a) writers too are as medieval as they are... If you take to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay

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