Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 articles from January 2007

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 archives from January 2007

Bearded women in early modern England.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2007... "An old man, whose beard was all ouer-growne with gray haires, ask'd a Foole how he might do to become yong again: The Fool answered: Goe to the Barber: But how if that will not serue (said the old man) how then? The Foole reply'd: Then bind...

Skeltonic anxiety and rumination in The Shepheardes Calender.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2007... The Shepheardes Calender is a work profoundly anxious about the meaning of its poet. Often when a critic points out anxiety in a poem, we learn more about the critic's own anxieties than the poem's. Rather than deny that pitfall, I want to...

Sidney's New Arcadia and the decay of Protestant republicanism.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2007... [H]is intent and scope was to turn the barren philosophy precepts into pregnant images of life, and in them, first on the monarch's part, lively to represent the growth, state and declination of princes, change of government and...

Commerce and Cadiz in Spenser's Prothalamion.(Edmund Spenser)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2007... Spenser's Prothalamion (1596) is occasioned by betrothals. It also mediates, as critics have noted, metaphysical, vocational, aesthetic, and political matters. Among these we should continue to include Spenser's assessment of the Earl of...

Anamorphosis and the religious subject of George Herbert's "Coloss. 3.3.".(Critical essay)
January 1, 2007... George Herbert experiments in clever and often profound ways with the interplay between visual and literary traditions. Although "Coloss. 3.3." is not one of his better-known poems, it is in a certain sense one of the most insistently visual...

The irregular aesthetic of The Blazing-World.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2007... For his next-to-last experiment in New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall (1660), Robert Boyle suffocated a lark within the air pump, noting that upon "Exsuction of the Air, she began manifestly to droop and appear sick, and very soon after was...

On reason, faith, and freedom in Paradise Lost.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2007... Over the last thirty-five years, Stanley Fish has provided one of the most comprehensive and influential treatments of how, in Paradise Lost, Milton understands and dramatizes the human freedoms to believe and to act. This treatment, I wish to...

Milton's serpent and the birth of pagan error.(John Milton's Paradise Lost)
January 1, 2007... I When Milton's Satan enters the serpent and approaches Eve in Paradise Lost, he comes equipped with more than a crested head and a "burnisht Neck of verdant Gold" (9.501). (1) He also bears an impressive array of classical allusions. The...

Trope and truth in The Pilgrim's Progress.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2007... What is life? A frenzy. What is life? A vain hope, a shadow, a fiction. --Pedro Calderon de la Barca Considered in allegorical terms, then, the profane world is both elevated and devalued. --Walter Benjamin (1) In "The Author's...

Recent studies in the English Renaissance.
January 1, 2007... The books on nondramatic English Renaissance literature are notable this year for featuring a veritable renaissance of the author. Of the eighty-nine books received, forty were on single authors--whether in monographs, editions, collections of...