Search results for "tag:"Author William Kuskin""

Book SynopsisWilliam Caxton (ca. 14211492) and the printers who immediately followed him, Wynkyn de Worde and Richard Pynson, dominated early English printing. Surprisingly, their ideological impact on English literary historytheir transformation of a textual economy based in manuscript production, their strategic development of authorship, their collation of English literatureremains largely unrecognized, overshadowed by the work of later sixteenth-century printers and folded into the general transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. This collection, the first such work on Caxton and his contemporaries, consists of ten original essays that explore early English culture, from Caxton''s introduction of the press, through questions of audience, translation, politics, and genre, to the modern fascination with Caxton''s books. The contributors to this volume approach the study of the printed book as the study of literary culture, and so broaden the traditional terms of bibliography to arguTrade Review"Caxton's Trace is an ambitious collection of essays whose contributions extend well beyond their late fifteenth-century focus. This volume is particularly impressive for its integrity: the chapters cohere to a remarkable degree, creating sustained interventions in our ongoing study of printing, of technology and culture, of early capitalism, and of English nationalism."—Journal of British Studies“This is a collection of essays diverse in subject. . . . At the center is a group of historical and political essays, and outside these are essays on a wide range of topics: jobbing, composite volumes, nineteenth-century Caxton scholarship, the linguistic implications of early English printing. The essays are generally sound. . . this is clearly not a book about material books; it is rather a book about the ideas of books, with its announced subject, early English printing, functioning largely as support for predetermined and familiar conclusions.” —Speculum“These ten essays ambitiously cover a circuit of human production and consumption from early English printers to readers; from merchants to kings; and from literature to commerce and politics. Somewhat surprised by the commercial nature of books, they bring the literary community's analytical methods to material evidence.” —SHARP News (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing)“This collection of ten essays, each by a different scholar, seeks to reappraise Caxton’s achievement and influence chiefly on later fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English printing . . . . David Carlson has good things to say about Caxton’s jobbing printing. A. E. B Coldiron looks closely and well at the various early modern printings of Christine de Pisan’s Proverbs. And Tim Machan gives an excellent overview of the printing of medieval English texts in the first half of the sixteenth century.” —Times Literary Supplement"Caxton’s Trace is an excellent collection that takes up an important and understudied moment in the development of vernacular literature." —Ethan Knapp, Ohio State University"This is a significant contribution to the history of the book. It examines the reified idea of the separation between the medieval and early modern period in a sophisticated and illuminating way. The essays engage the problematics of periodization while also interrogating the twin notions that print somehow mystically transformed the Middle Ages into modernity and that the fifteenth century is merely transitional, and, thus, unconnected with modernity." —Thomas Prendergast, The College of Wooster

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Book SynopsisIn Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity, William Kuskin asks us to reconsider the relationship between literary form and historical period. As Kuskin observes, most current literary histories of medieval and early modern English literature hew to period, presenting the Middle Ages and modernity as discrete, separated by a heterodox and unstable fifteenth century. In contrast, the major writers of the sixteenth centuryPhilip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, the Holinshed Syndicate, and their editorswere intense readers of the fifteenth century and consciously looked back to its history and poetry as they shaped their own. Kuskin examines their work in light of the writings they knewthat of Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, William Caxton, and the anonymous London Chroniclesto demonstrate that fifteenth-century textual forms exist within the most significant statements of literary modernity. In short, by reconsidering the relationship betweeTrade Review"Brilliant and provocative, William Kuskin's Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity is original in its combination of literary and book history, compelling in its vision of a model of recursion, and inspiring in its ambitiousness. It is the kind of book that literary studies needs right now." —Kent Cartwright, University of Maryland"In this pioneering work, William Kuskin turns a keen eye on the literary production of early modernity and discovers there the traces of recursivity: instances in which ostensible breaks with the past turn out always to embed the past. As a mode of composition, recursivity challenges the very tenets of literary history and thus requires its own method of literary criticism. Instead of reading works through the lens of periodization, Kuskin argues, we would do better to read them with their own pasts in view: that is, as they appear in the physical books in which they first appeared, whose codicological semiotics often recur to an earlier period—in the case of the works Kuskin considers, to the Middle Ages." —Martha Rust, New York University“Kuskin has written a timely, important book. . . . As one of the leading authorities on the English printer, editor, and translator William Caxton, Kuskin clearly establishes the need for those in English studies to look at the texts of the fifteeenth century. There one will find the origins of the so-called early modern period and the canonical authors who wrote them.” —Choice“Recursive Origins is exceptionally strong in its detail, and will be of value to anybody interested in the reception of late medieval culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or in the relationship between manuscript and print technologies.” —SHARP News“This study thus importantly contributes to current conversations that seek to emphasize literary history’s formal properties. Although Kuskin does not press the point, he also usefully spells out how familiar versions of medieval and early modern periodization take their cue from sixteenth-century writers themselves, who repeatedly claim to depart from the past even as their works recur upon its material texts and tropes.” —Renaissance Quarterly“Overall, Recursive Origins makes a brilliant argument, all the more so for its seeming simplicity. Kuskin’s theory of textual formalism already underlies some of the best scholarly work being done in the field and it promises fruitful re-contextualizations of canonical works for years to come. Indeed, like the best academic studies, Recursive Origins presents an overwhelmingly elegant solution to a pervasive and hotly debated problem.” —The Sixteenth Century Journal“Recursive Origins tells a compelling story with a clear antagonist: the literary period. William Kuskin’s mighty ambition in this book is to ‘provide an alternative model for conceiving of literary history,’ resisting the totalizing temporal categories of modernity and the logic of revolution or rupture . . . that defines and legitimizes them.” —Modern Language Quarterly“Kuskin is an attentive reader of literary texts, a sharp critic of contacts and overlaps between texts from different centuries, and an effective synthesizer of a complex and vast body of evidence and arguments about print, bibliography, and textual history of literary texts which he analyzes with great skill in this timely book.” —Renaissance and Reformation

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Book SynopsisIn this pioneering work, William Kuskin turns a keen eye on the literary production of early modernity and discovers there the traces of recursivity.Trade Review"Brilliant and provocative, William Kuskin's Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity is original in its combination of literary and book history, compelling in its vision of a model of recursion, and inspiring in its ambitiousness. It is the kind of book that literary studies needs right now." —Kent Cartwright, University of Maryland"In this pioneering work, William Kuskin turns a keen eye on the literary production of early modernity and discovers there the traces of recursivity: instances in which ostensible breaks with the past turn out always to embed the past. As a mode of composition, recursivity challenges the very tenets of literary history and thus requires its own method of literary criticism. Instead of reading works through the lens of periodization, Kuskin argues, we would do better to read them with their own pasts in view: that is, as they appear in the physical books in which they first appeared, whose codicological semiotics often recur to an earlier period—in the case of the works Kuskin considers, to the Middle Ages." —Martha Rust, New York University“Kuskin has written a timely, important book. . . . As one of the leading authorities on the English printer, editor, and translator William Caxton, Kuskin clearly establishes the need for those in English studies to look at the texts of the fifteeenth century. There one will find the origins of the so-called early modern period and the canonical authors who wrote them.” —Choice“Recursive Origins is exceptionally strong in its detail, and will be of value to anybody interested in the reception of late medieval culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or in the relationship between manuscript and print technologies.” —SHARP News“This study thus importantly contributes to current conversations that seek to emphasize literary history’s formal properties. Although Kuskin does not press the point, he also usefully spells out how familiar versions of medieval and early modern periodization take their cue from sixteenth-century writers themselves, who repeatedly claim to depart from the past even as their works recur upon its material texts and tropes.” —Renaissance Quarterly“Overall, Recursive Origins makes a brilliant argument, all the more so for its seeming simplicity. Kuskin’s theory of textual formalism already underlies some of the best scholarly work being done in the field and it promises fruitful re-contextualizations of canonical works for years to come. Indeed, like the best academic studies, Recursive Origins presents an overwhelmingly elegant solution to a pervasive and hotly debated problem.” —The Sixteenth Century Journal“Recursive Origins tells a compelling story with a clear antagonist: the literary period. William Kuskin’s mighty ambition in this book is to ‘provide an alternative model for conceiving of literary history,’ resisting the totalizing temporal categories of modernity and the logic of revolution or rupture . . . that defines and legitimizes them.” —Modern Language Quarterly“Kuskin is an attentive reader of literary texts, a sharp critic of contacts and overlaps between texts from different centuries, and an effective synthesizer of a complex and vast body of evidence and arguments about print, bibliography, and textual history of literary texts which he analyzes with great skill in this timely book.” —Renaissance and Reformation

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