Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens, eds. Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism.

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-JUN-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 www.wmich.edu/compdr

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Pp. xx + 244. $65.00.

You will not agree with everything in this book. What is probable is that, whatever your specialty and your point of view, you will find parts of it much more convincing (or unconvincing) than the rest. A diverse and often contentious set of reflections on the study and teaching of early modern texts, Discontinuities abounds with disjunctions and contradictions. In their introduction, the editors themselves anticipate the reader's "experience ... of constantly having the ground from underneath one cut away" (xviii). Whether or not the reader herself is so unsure of matters as to react with such insecurity, Comensoli and Stevens have succeeded in creating a forum for an exceptionally honest and provocative exchange of opinions. Although no such volume can be comprehensive, this one exposes to an unusual degree of scrutiny many of the conflicting forces that shape the field as it stands now, in the aftermath of the upheavals of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and offers contrasting alternatives for renewal.

The essays, contributed for the most part (and in comparable numbers) by critics from Canada and from the United States, mainly attest to the importance of six interrelated influences in the study of Early Modern texts today: new historicism, post-structuralism, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and questions about canonicity and textual tradition or "reproduction." (This seems a large enough net to cast in one book--even if it does not extend to the equally prominent subjects of post-colonialism and race, or to queer theory apart from one brief appearance.) With a few exceptions, however, these authors share an overriding concern with the theoretical significance of historicism. Many contributors see our uncertainty about the latter as symptoms of a long-term crisis, in which the stakes are high for future scholars as well as for the broader reception--if there is to be any--of Renaissance texts into the culture of a new millenium.

Among the manifesto-writers is Linda Woodbridge, whose essay, "Dark Ladies: Women, Social History, and English Renaissance Literature," is one of several in Discontinuities that are so trenchantly written as to qualify as position papers on the state of the discipline. Woodbridge evokes a nightmare prospect in which, "stretched on a...

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