Product Description

This is the first comprehensive collection of English Renaissance literary criticism to appear for nearly a century. Brian Vickers has brought together a wide-ranging selection of texts, some well-known (such as Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry, the most brilliant critical essay of the whole Renaissance, here given complete), some little-known (Dudley North's account of Metaphysical poetry), and one being printed for the first time (John Ford's elegy on John Fletcher). In an extensive introduction the editor surveys the main sources and models for English criticism, which turn out to be the major classical texts fusing poetics and rhetoric: Cicero, Quintilian, Horace, Plutarch. Whereas modern literary theory conceives of an autonomous poetic (the poem existing as a verbal artefact, irrespective of its influence on the reader) in the Renaissance all critical theories were rhetorical, seeing literature as having a deliberate design on its readers, to arouse their feelings and to make them love virtue, hate vice. Writers commonly saw their task as being to 'inflame' readers with the desire to emulate goodness. Renaissance literary criticism is also prescriptive, not descriptive: that is, it describes how literature should be written and what effects it should strive for. Accepting this orientation, the editor has included a substantial selection from the major hand-books on rhetoric and poetics, Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique (1560) and George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie (1589). The emphasis throughout is on the links between literary criticism and literature itself. Most of the selections were produced by the practitioners themselves, poets and dramatists discussing their art: Gascoigne, Spenser, Campion, Daniel, Jonson, Shakespeare (in one of the scenes he contributed to Edward III), Chapman, Fletcher, Heywood, Massinger, Milton. The anthology also includes discussions of all the major literary genres: Senecan tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, pastoral and allegory, Homeric translations, epic and romance, religious and lyric poetry. All selections are annotated, identifying classical and other sources, and giving translations for Greek, Latin, and Italian texts. A section is devoted to Further Reading, and an extensive glossary is provided for archaic and technical words.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #866201 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

Alastair Fowler, Times Literary Supplement
"Vickers's Notes are a model of pertinence and economy. They not only adduce a wide variety of ancient sources, but ascribe these discriminatingly, in accordance with modern scholarship."

Review
Well-conceived and well-tuned anthology ... informative introduction ... this book will become an indispensable source for scholars, theoreticians of literature, university professors, writers, and nonacademic readers for as long as our interest in Renaissance studies continues. (In-between, Essays & Studies in Literary Criticism )

He [Vickers] illuminates the classical background to his texts with particular clarity ... This richly rewarding collection is a worthy successor to the classic anthologies of Gregory Smith and J. E. Spingarn. (English Studies )

Vickers's splendid, fifty-five page introduction puts his selection in context, tracing its application of the dazzling variety of classical rhetoric. This must be one of the most pithily compressed accounts ever attempted of criticism as applied to rhetoric. (Alastair Fowler, Times Literary Supplement )

Vickers's Notes are a model of pertinence and economy. They not only adduce a wide variety of ancient sources, but ascribe these discriminatingly, in accordance with modern scholarship. (Alastair Fowler, Times Literary Supplement )

This excellent anthology can be recommended with very few reservations. Let us hope it will be followed by a second volume continuing the selection into the seventeenth century. (Alastair Fowler, Times Literary Supplement )

English Renaissance Literary Criticism may well become the standard reference collection ... the greatest coup is John Ford's elegy on John Fletcher, discovered by the late Jeremy Maule and printed here for the first time. (Alastair Fowler, Times Literary Supplement )

Alastair Fowler, TLS
"this excellent anthology can be recommended with very few reservations. Let us hope it will be followed by a second volume comtinuing the selection into the seventeenth century."