Renaissance Historicism · Selections From "English Literary Renaissance"

The Renaissance is presently the focus for all the new critical theories that reexamine literary texts: feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, postmodernism, and cultural poetics. Renaissance Historicism collects some of the best essays that illustrate all the major traditional methods of historical literary criticism as well as the wide range of new critical perspectives by established authorities and important new voices. Already hailed in Studies in English Literature as the collection which caused "the New Historicism" to enter "into scholarly canonicity," this volume is both an introduction to and survey of a rapidly growing field of debate and achievement. The range of this volume is unmatched in the viewpoints it employs and in the texts and genres it reconsiders. A new preface reviews succinctly all the methods—old and new, scholarly and critical—brought into play by the contributors. The accessibility of the contents makes this collection equally valuable as an introduction to historicism and literary texts and as a reference for future study.