{"product_id":"untold-futures-9781501746802","title":"Untold Futures","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eUntold Futures\u003c\/i\u003e, J. K. Barret locates models for recovering the variety of futures imagined within some of our most foundational literature. These poems, plays, and prose fictions reveal how Renaissance writers embraced uncertain potential to think about their own present moment and their own place in time. The history of the future that Barret reconstructs looks beyond futures implicitly dismissed as impossible or aftertimes defined by inevitability and fixed perspective. Chapters on Philip Sidney's \u003ci\u003eOld Arcadia\u003c\/i\u003e, Edmund Spenser's \u003ci\u003eThe Faerie Queene\u003c\/i\u003e, William Shakespeare's \u003ci\u003eTitus Andronicus\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eAntony and Cleopatra\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eCymbeline\u003c\/i\u003e, and John Milton's \u003ci\u003eParadise Lost\u003c\/i\u003e trace instead a persistent interest in an indeterminate, earthly future evident in literary constructions that foreground anticipation and expectation. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBarret argues that the temporal perspectives embedded in these literary texts unsettle some of our most familiar points of \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eUntold Futures\u003c\/i\u003e offers persuasive close analysis of the literary techniques and devices through which Barret suggests these writers were constantly 'capturing, pacing, arranging and reimagining linear time'.... [T]he future is destabilized, overdetermined, and ultimately, 'reliably, even permanently, ephemeral' in \u003ci\u003eUntold Futures\u003c\/i\u003e. This book succeeds in making us question not only the fixity of future times, but the very terms we use to describe this period in history itself.\u003c\/p\u003e * Renaissance Quarterly *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eA smart and daring work of scholarship that speaks to some of the most pressing issues in the study of sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature today. Barret's argument ties together a novel critique of periodization with a sophisticated recuperation of the aesthetic, and her style of argumentation realizes an alternative critical model to the historicism that has long held sway over the field.\u003ci\u003e Untold Futures\u003c\/i\u003e should be read by anybody for whom the 'literary' in literary history still makes a difference, and should be required to be read by everybody for whom it does not.\u003c\/p\u003e * Shakespeare Quarterly *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eThought-provoking, insightful, and carefully crafted.... At the heart of \u003ci\u003eUntold Futures\u003c\/i\u003e, then, is a challenge to familiar teleologies. Calvinist election, secularist science, the humanist recovery of antiquity: all are in play as these authors pose alternative conceptions of future time, but none of these developments explains early modern temporal consciousness as these literary works envision it. Barret instead credits literature itself for constructing new modes of temporality.\u003c\/p\u003e * Journal of British History *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne of the many things that makes this book impressive is the fact that Barret is not just a skilled intellectual and literary historian, but also an expert close-reader. She manages to weave big ideas through the complex particularities of literary language without losing any of the latter's nuance or energy.\u003c\/p\u003e * Studies in English Literature *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eBarret's way of thinking and challenging the habitual perceptions of time are groundbreaking.\u003c\/p\u003e * The Sixteenth Century Journal *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe book is a shot in the arm for critics wondering about the direction literary scholarship will take in the years and decades to come. Fortunately, Barret makes a strong case that the future is wide open.\u003c\/p\u003e * Comitatus *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eA thought-provoking, insightful, and carefully crafted book.\u003c\/p\u003e * Journal of British Studies *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eBarret does a fine job articulating technical and historically sited arguments in accessible language, and she avoids contemporary theoretical jargon in favor of broad engagement with a refreshingly diverse range of scholarly approaches.\u003c\/p\u003e * Choice *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eIntroduction\u003cbr\u003e 1. Promising the Future: The Language of Obligation in Sidney's Old Arcadia\u003cbr\u003e 2. The History of the Future: Spenser's The Faerie Queene and the Directions of Time\u003cbr\u003e 3. The Fiction of the Future: Dangerous Reading in Titus Andronicus\u003cbr\u003e 4. Shakespeare's Second Future: Anticipatory Nostalgia in Cymbeline\u003cbr\u003e 5. Imminent Futures: Absent Art and Improvised Rhyme in Antony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline\u003cbr\u003e Afterword: Circles of the Future: Memory or Monument in Paradise Lost\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Cornell University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49409340932439,"sku":"9781501746802","price":22.39,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781501746802.jpg?v=1730506481","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/untold-futures-9781501746802","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}