Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 articles from January 2008

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 archives from January 2008

Utopian communication.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2008... The Reformation was in part a conflict about communication: not only about which church had the authority to transmit doctrine or how doctrine should be transmitted, but also, more broadly, about how God communicates with humanity. This is...

Profeminism in Philip Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2008... In 1579 Stephen Gosson published a pamphlet titled The Schoole of Abuse describing and decrying the immorality of English playhouses and English poetry. Although Gosson dedicated his tract to "the right noble / Gentleman, Master Philip Sidney,"...

Literacy, education, and affect in Astrophil and Stella.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2008... When Astrophil stumbles on a sleeping Stella in the Second song of the sonnet sequence bearing their names, he considers forcing himself on her. Challenging himself to "invade the fort," he then hesitates, fearing Stella will grow angry. (1) In...

Cupid, idolatry, and iconoclasm in Sidney's Arcadia.(Philip Sidney)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2008... The erotic in Sir Philip Sidney's work is insistently and profoundly ocular. In book 1 of the New Arcadia, Pyrocles tells how his passion for Philoclea began when he gazed on her portrait. Subsequently confronted by her beauty in the flesh, he...

Allegorical insubordination and the 1596 Faerie Queene.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2008... I Scudamore's account of his seizure of an unwilling Amoret from the Temple of Venus in book 4, canto 10 of The Faerie Queene has come to pose a problem to interpreters, some of whom see it as a rescue, some as an act of rape. (1) The...

Maternal memory and murder in early-seventeenth-century England.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2008... The mother loseth her owne life, Because she her child doth kill, O murder, lust and murder, Is the foule sinke of sin. --from the ballad "Murder upon Murder" (1635) Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she...

Framing wifely advice in Thomas Heywood's A Curtaine Lecture and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.(William Shakespeare)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2008... The frontispiece for Richard Brathwaite's Ar't Asleepe Husband? A Boulster Lecture depicts a husband and wife in bed together. "Why are you silent while I am talking to you?" the wife asks. "I am deaf to dogs," her husband replies. (1) This...

John Denham and Lucy Hutchinson's commonplace book.(Essay)
January 1, 2008... JOHN DENHAM IN MANUSCRIPT In 1656, Humphrey Moseley published a translation of 549 lines from the second book of Virgil's Aeneid entitled The Destruction of Troy. (1) Moseley entered the text in the Stationers' Register on 5 February 1656,...

Andrew Marvell's ambivalence toward adult sexuality.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2008... "I am not concerned with so-called 'sex' at all. Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets." --Humbert Humbert, Lolita (1) Vladimir...

Recent studies in the English Renaissance.(Recommended readings)
January 1, 2008... This year's printing of books on Renaissance literature and culture clearly testifies to the vitality and the versatility of scholarship in the field. Important trends include ongoing and increasingly sophisticated attention to material...