Product Description

This second edition of Isabel Rivers' seminal and much loved text will be a boon to teachers and students of poetry. Rivers guides the reader around classical and Christian ideas, illustrating how Renaissance poetry draws on these ideas and suggesting where the reader can find out more. A new introduction and fully updated bibliography make this an indispensible tool for the study of English poetry.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23821 in Books
• Published on: 1994-12-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 248 pages

From the Back Cover

Since publication in 1979 Isabel Rivers' sourcebook has established itself as the essential guide to English Renaissance poetry. It:

• provides an account of the main classical and Christian ideas, outlining their meaning, their origins and their transmission to the Renaissance;
• illustrates the ways in which Renaissance poetry drew on classical and Christian ideas;
• contains extracts from key classical and Christian texts and relates these to the extracts of the English poems which draw on them;
• includes suggestions for further reading, and an invaluable bibliographical appendix.

Customer Reviews

a fantastic introduction
this is an excellent introduction, and i can't believe i almost went into my final exams without the benefit of its wisdom! isabel rivers provides a very clear and readable summary of a dozen or so of the main concepts and schools of thought that influenced renaissance thought - in this respect, i suppose, the book is a misnomer because it more about the classical and christian ideas and less about their influence on the renaissance, and even less exclusively in poetry (prose is equally covered) - although their use in the renaissance is perfectly adequately covered. rivers manages to include a lot of information in a small number of pages (her chapters are rarely longer than eight pages) and yet the book is not dense.

what is really great about this book is the novel way it follows each chapter with a series of excerpts from classical to renaissance texts relevant to the issue just discussed. each issue is comprehensively covered, and the variety of authors is large too. it is so nice, and novel, to actually be able to read for oneself some of the paragraphs that shaped the history of, well, western civilisation, without just deducing what they say from summaries in critical books. and these extracts are beautiful, and thought provoking in themselves and have piqued my interest in books i would never have thought to read otherwise -and indeed, books id read but didnt particualrly care about. this book has done more than perhaps any other for my enjoyment of renaissance literature.

the only problem i would say is the lack of date by the extract, which makes it impossible to construct a chronology of changing attitudes (espeically important when there are two texts by, say, milton, with differeing views) - in the bibliography at the back only the most recent edition is given. but this is nonetheless a very useful book.

it should be added that this review pertains to the 1st edition of 1979, while this one has a revised bibliography and new introduction, but i imagine they are largely the same.