William C. Johnson

New perspectives on the life and art of Richard Crashaw

Richard Crashaw (1612/13-1649) has been one of the most neglected, misunderstood, misread, and unappreciated of the so-called major metaphysical poets. Critics have long labeled Crashaw s poetry foreign, grotesque: deficient in judgment and taste, and even sexually perverse. In recent years, however, Crashaw s role in providing an understanding and appreciation of seventeenth century poetic theory and aesthetics has become increasingly more evident to literary scholars and critics. They now generally agree that his poetry occupies a permanent and significant position in the intellectual, religious, and literary history of his time.This collection of ten original critical and historical essays on the life and art of Crashaw will serve as a further impetus to the renewed interest in Crashaw. In the introduction, John R. Roberts and Lorraine M. Roberts survey past Crashavian criticism, giving the reader an overall view of the critical response to Crashaw and his work. The introduction also signals new directions for future scholarship. Scholars, critics, and students of metaphysical, baroque, and religious poetry will find these essays engaging and insightful.

Shepheards devises : Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes calender and the institutions of Elizabethan society

In this study of Edmund Spensers 1579 poem The Shepheardes Calender, Robert Lane attempts to uncover hidden dimensions of Spensers earliest important work by placing it in the historical context of Queen Elizabeths reign and showing how thoroughly it engages the fundamental sociopolitical issues that confronted English society of the time. Rejecting earlier formalist and new historicist readings that viewed Elizabethan culture as fundamentally aristocratic, Lane reveals this poems thoroughgoing identification with the non-elite of Spensers society. By including such popular forms as fables, proverbs and woodcuts, and by drawing on the vernacular literary tradition of Piers Plowman and Skeltons Collyn Clout, Lane argues, the Calender demonstrates the value of the voice and culture of subordinate classes in the highly stratified Elizabethan social order. Adopting the perspective of those who were politically and culturally disenfranchised proves integral to the poems critique of the key Elizabethan institutions: the Crown and Church, the social hierarchy, the practice of patronage, and the economic system. As Lane notes, discussion of such issues in Spensers society was dangerous because the Crown claimed a prerogative to govern public speech. Lane describes how Spenser, while challenging this prerogative, used strategies that protected him from official retaliation. Important among these was Spensers inclusion of voices within the text that seem to present an orthodox position but are in fact critically scrutinised. Lane goes on to show that by taking up controversial social and political issues, the Calender also raises the question of poetrys social role. Whereas most modern scholarship reads the poem as a monovocal treatise on aesthetics that is firmly aligned with the Court, Lane demonstrates that contained within the Calenders poetic discussion is a debate that actually interrogates the social status and function of courtly poetry and begins to outline an alternative conception consonant with its own practice.

Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser.

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Vita contemplativa and the pastoral 2. Colins debut 3. The Faerie Queene (1590) 4. Colin Clout 5. Exit Colin Clout 6. The pastoral of the self 7. Conclusion Notes Index.

Spenser's allegory of love : social vision in Books III, IV, and V of The faerie queene

When the major characters in Books III, IV, and V of The Faerie Queene are understood as fictional personages who function psychically according to Renaissance sexual psychology and physically according to Renaissance sexual physiology, the interwoven quests can be separated out and read in their own peculiar, allegorical way, as imitations of actions.

Spenser's Amoretti : analogies of love

This work analyzes Spensers setting of the entire Amoretti courtship against a backdrop of sacred time and his efforts to demonstrate the interpenetration of the divine and the human. The eighty-nine sonnets are shown to be sequential in their complex pattern of balanced themes, structural frameworks, developing images, and clusters of etymological wordplay.

The Anatomy of Melancholy, Vol. 4

What do you do to start reading the anatomy of melancholy vol 2? Searching the book that you love to read first or find an interesting book that will make you want to read? Everybody has difference with their reason of reading a book. Actuary, reading habit must be from earlier. Many people may be love to read, but not a book. Its not fault. Someone will be bored to open the thick book with small words to read. In more, this is the real condition. So do happen probably with this the anatomy of melancholy vol 2.

An Index to the Biblical References, Parallels, and Allusions in the Poetry and Prose of John Milton.

This reference tool identifies the specifics of Miltons reliance upon the Bible and provides a data base for that information. Milton students and scholars are easily enabled to appreciate the range and frequency of biblical books, chapters, and verses with which he underscored, enriched, and even qualified the sound and sense of particular poems and prose tracts. The index also allows easy comprehension of Miltons careful and discriminate applications of biblical references, realizing that as poet and essayist, he sought a balance between the strict theological doctrines of the Word and the more modern discipline of his own literary imagination.

The Spenser Encyclopedia.

This masterly work ought to be The Elizabethan Encyclopedia, and no less. - Cahiers Elizabethains Edmund Spenser remains one of Britains most famous poets. With nearly 700 entries this Encyclopedia provides a comprehensive one-stop reference tool for: * appreciating Spensers poetry in the context of his age and our own * understanding the language, themes and characters of the poems * easy to find entries arranged by subject.

Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature

Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. xvii + 367, hb. £37.95, ISBN: 0691090289.In polemical writings, ones own side is always moderate, while the other side is characterized as irresponsible extremists: Drydens strongly partisan Absalom and Achitophel, for example, pretends to espouse a via media, targeted to please the more Moderate sort. In this wide-ranging, erudite study, Joshua Scodel shows how the classical ideal of the mean is reinterpreted and appropriated in different contexts by writers ranging from Spenser to Aphra Behn. Later chapters, the most interesting in the book, illustrate how other writers of the period, working in the traditions of love poetry and the Anacreontic/Horatian drinking song, reject dull moderation altogether.Though Scodel seems to have read everything remotely connected with his topic, the main strengths of this impressive study lie not in its exhaustiveness but in sensitive detailed commentary on individual texts. A chapter on Donne, largely devoted to close readings of Satire 3 and a verse epistle to Sir Henry Wooton, examines the ways in which Donne adapts the tradition of the via media to argue the case for freedom of enquiry, the unfettered conscience. Milton, as one would expect, emerges as champion of moderation, in perceptive commentaries on LAllegro and Il Peneroso, Paradise Lost, and the sonnets Lawrence of virtuous father virtuous son and Cyriack, whose grandsire on the royal bench - the latter two perhaps the least Bacchanalian drinking songs ever written.Two chapters on the symposiastic lyric celebrating the pleasures of wine and companionship are attentive to the manner in which Jonson, Herrick, Lovelace, Rochester, and such relatively obscure poets as Alexander Brome and Charles Cotton responded to changing historical circumstances. Canary wine for the elite, educated in their tastes, is contrasted with strong beer for the rude multitude (Herricks The Hock-Cart is one of the few poems to celebrate both), and drinking in moderation to summon the Muse is contrasted with hard drinking to promote oblivion among the defeated royalists in the 1650s, hoping, as in Lovelaces The Vintage to the Dungeon, to Triumph in your Bonds and Paines,/ And daunce to thMusick of your Chaines. Rochester, from this perspective, represents a cul de sac, someone who with patrician arrogance . . . expresses his right to fulfil all his desires (p. 251), celebrating licentious excess - a view of the poet which denies him any complexity and ignores the fact that he is a satirist, concerned with ethical and political questions, as well as a lyric poet. …

Time, Space, and Value: The Narrative Structure of the New Arcadia.

If you really want to be smarter, reading can be one of the lots ways to evoke and realize. Many people who like reading will have more knowledge and experiences. Reading can be a way to gain information from economics, politics, science, fiction, literature, religion, and many others. As one of the part of book categories, time space and value the narrative structure of the new arcadia always becomes the most wanted book. Many people are absolutely searching for this book. It means that many love to read this kind of book.