English Renaissance Literary Criticism

by Brian Vickers

Overview

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).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198186793
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/16/2000
Pages:	672
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Brian Vickers is Chair of English Language and Literature, ETH Zürich

Table of Contents

PrefaceAbbreviationsIntroductionFurther ReadingA Note on the Texts1. Sir Thomas Elyot2. Henry Howard3. Thomas Wilson4. Alexander Neville5. William Baldwin6. Roger Ascham7. George Gascoigne8. George Whetstone9 Edmund Spenser and E.K.10. George Puttenham11. Edmund Spenser12. Sir John Harrington13. William Shakespeare14. Gabriel Harvey15. Sir Philip Sidney16. George Chapman17. Robert Southwell18. John Hoskyns19. Thomas Campion20. Samuel Daniel21. Ben Jonson, Rhymes against rhyme22. Francis Bacon23. Ben Jonson, The moral function of poetry24. Thomas Heywood25. John Fletcher26. Dudley North27. George Chapman28. Ben Jonson, The faults of contemporary drama29. William Drummond30. Ben Jonson, A tribute to Shakespeare31. John Ford32. Philip Massinger33. Thomas Carew34. Ben Jonson, Notes on literature35. John Milton36. Thomas HobbesGlossaryList of Rhetorical FiguresIndex

Editorial Reviews

The index is admirably efficient as regards rhetorical figures and other brief entries....this excellent anthology can be recommended with very few reservations. Let us hope it will be followed by a second volume continuing the selection further into the seventeenth century.
—The Times Literary Supplement

Alastair Fowler

"Indispensable to all academic collections...will give students, scholars, and general readers a new context in which to understand the emergence of early-modern literary culture."—Choice

"Invaluable...In the pages of this volume, the voices of [Shakespeare's] contemporaries make it abundantly clear that his verbal mastery was no accident."—The Providence Journal

"Brian Vickers has performed an important service for scholars of the English Renaissance by providing a superb anthology of literary critical texts. The introductory materials and the notes to each selection readily demonstrate Vickers's precise and authoritative scholarship."—Sixteenth Century Journal

"[It] may well become the standard reference collection."—Alastair Fowler, Times Literary Supplement

"Vickers is still one of the liveliest of grand old men of Shakespeare scholarship.... The book is now available in paperback and would be excellent for college courses in criticism."—Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance

From the Publisher