Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 articles from January 2005

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 archives from January 2005

Literary property and the single woman in Isabella Whitney's A Sweet Nosgay.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... The mid-Tudor poet and maidservant Isabella Whitney (fl. 1567-73) published her second book of verse, A Sweet Nosgay (1573), from a stance perhaps surprising to readers of Renaissance women's writing--as a poor, single woman who explicitly...

Authorial self-consciousness in Nashe's The Vnfortvnate Traveller.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... Prose fiction has always been the red-haired stepchild of English Renaissance literary studies, and many critical methodologies--despite their finesse with other genres--unwittingly contribute to this neglect. (1) Had "metaphysical" lyrics not...

Looking at Britomart looking at pictures.(Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... Britomart encounters more tapestry and statue than any other character in The Faerie Queene, but such profusion is not in itself unusual. Ekphrasis, the description of visual artwork, is everywhere present in the literature of the sixteenth...

Vision, metamorphosis, and the poetics of allegory in the Mutabilitie Cantos.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... Theologians there are, who, nourished in certain sects, seek the truth of nature in all her specific natural forms in which they see the eternal essence, the specific substantial perpetuator of the eternal generation and...

Alchemical augmentation and primordial fire in Donne's "The Dissolution".(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... That John Donne's "The Dissolution" has been generally ignored is illustrated by his biographers, Robert C. Bald and John Carey, neither of whom comments on the poem. (1) Granted, it appears in only a few manuscripts; (2) nevertheless, one...

The private opinions of Sir Thomas Browne.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... Young and inexperienced as an author when he wrote Religio Medici, Thomas Browne was understandably nervous about the reception of his text. Indeed, he seems to have been so nervous as to opt for circulating his work in manuscript rather than...

Seventeenth-century manuscript sources of Alice Thornton's life.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... Among the "seminal women's autobiographies" of early modern lives, (1) the only edition of the seventeenth-century life written by Alice Thornton (1626-1707) omits large amounts of important material from this Yorkshire gentry woman's memorable...

Spiritual reading in Milton's Eikonoklastes.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... The English people needed to be particularly discerning readers during the turbulent years following the regicide. Royalists and revolutionaries cried out in print for support, and the choice between them could be construed as a choice between...

Skepticism and poetry in Milton's infernal conclave.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... In the preface to the second edition of Surprised by Sin (1997), Stanley Fish claims that his book's success during the previous thirty years is a result of its ability to reconcile the arguments of the two major competing strains in Milton...

Recent studies in the English Renaissance.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... It is remarkable how many of the books I received are about history: a number are written by historians, and published in a history series. I had expected a couple might be, but most, I thought, would be in "Renaissance nondramatic literature,"...

Abstracts.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... David Ainsworth, Spiritual Reading in Milton's Eikonoklastes This essay argues that Milton's Eikonoklastes succeeds as an educative polemic, though not as a piece of political propaganda. In Eikonoklastes, Milton advances a strenuous and...