Description
Book SynopsisThe essays in this collection explore the intersection between literary and material forms of writing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England by linking formalist analysis with the insights of book history.
Trade Review‘Above all what emerges from this fascinating collection of essays is the importance of material approaches to literary and nonliterary texts in dialogue with other modes of reading. As such, meaning is collaborative, constructed by diverse agents, including but not limited to authors, compilers, scribes, printers, stationers, and readers, and generated by physical and visual as well as textual forms such as script, typeface, page layout, paper, and size — in other words, all the various material extratextual features that communicated significant meaning to early modern writers and readers.’
James Daybell, University of Plymouth, Renaissance Quarterly 69.4 (Winter 2016)
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Table of ContentsIntroduction: Allison Deutermann and András Kiséry
I. Forming Literature
1. The first English printed commonplace books and the rise of the common reader – Heather James
2. Reading Shakespeare miscellaneously: Ben Jonson, Robert Chester, and the Vatum Chorus of Love’s Martyr – Matthew Zarnowiecki
3. ‘Divines into dry Vines’: forms of jesting in Renaissance England – Adam Smyth
4. Afterworlds: Thomas Middleton, the book, and the genre of continuation – Jeffrey Todd Knight
II. Translations
5. Greek playbooks and dramatic forms in early modern England – Tanya Pollard
6. Book, list, word: forms of translation in the work of Richard Hakluyt – Henry S. Turner
III. The matters of writing
7. The forms of news from France in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part three – Alan Stewart
8. Writings and the problem of satisfaction in Michaelmas Term – Amanda Bailey
9. Saving souls or selling (virtual) godliness? The ‘penny godlinesses’ of John Andrewes and the problem of ‘popular puritanism’ in early Stuart England – Peter Lake
10. How to construct a poem: Descartes, Sidney – Shankar Raman
11. Afterword – David Scott Kastan
Index
