Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 articles from January 1998

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 archives from January 1998

Courteous virtu in Spenser's Book 6 of 'The Faerie Quenne.' (author Edmund Spenser)
January 1, 1998... Since Richard Neuse accused Calidore of virtu thirty years ago, the issue of Spenser's Machiavellianism in book 6 has been an implicit but underexplored problem.(1) In this essay I propose to refine our conception of virtu and its function in the...

Cecropia and the Church of Antichrist in Sir Philip Sidney's 'New Arcadia.'
January 1, 1998... Sir Philip Sidney, all agree, actively championed the formation of an international Protestant political and military league throughout his political career and died fighting on behalf of the Protestant "Cause." Yet, the extent to which issues...

Subjectivity, exemplarity, and the establishing of characterization in 'Lucrece.'
January 1, 1998... As might be expected, much of the more recent commentary on Lucrece has focused on the interrelated matters of politics, gender, and subjectivity. The poem's representation of the Roman world and its politics, especially its sexual/gender...

Citizen history: Stow's 'Survey of London.' (author John Stow)
January 1, 1998... Until recently, the standard critical assessment of John Stow's Survey of London (1598) remained that established over sixty years ago by Louis B. Wright. Citing its "glowing praise of mercantile philanthropies," Wright judged the Survey "a...

Remembering Orpheus in the poems of Aemilia Lanyer.
January 1, 1998... Writing in 1611, Aemilia Lanyer, like other women poets of the era, faced the challenge of professing a poetic vocation in a cultural context that, rather than providing models for female poetic subjectivity, denounced women writers and belittled...

The labyrinth as style in 'Pamphilia to Amphilanthus.'
January 1, 1998... An image of poetic skill and of the circuitous rhetoric of self-delusion in Petrarch's Rime sparse, a monument to craftsmanship that befuddled Daedalus, its architect, in book 8 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the labyrinth symbolized both conscious...

Robert Herrick and the makings of 'Hesperides.'
January 1, 1998... When T. S. Eliot asked "What Is Minor Poetry?" and answered, by way of example, Robert Herrick's poems, he pointed in particular to lack of uniformity in Herrick's work. Contrasting Herrick's poetry and George Herbert's The Temple, where "many...

Milton's steps in time. (writer John Milton)
January 1, 1998... One of John Milton's earliest surviving poems was probably a grammar school exercise from St. Paul's. "Ignavus satrapam" takes its subject from the Aeneid: the slaughter of the Rutulians that Nisus and Euryalus wreaked while Turnus was in bed....

Recent studies in the English Renaissance.
January 1, 1998... The number of books received this year is down by a third from a year ago, by a fourth from two years past. Only future years will tell whether this shortfall is a temporary anomaly. It may reflect retrenchment by university presses. With...