I've been feeling lately (again) that I have no real comprehensive view of critical approaches to Ren. Lit. in English (or any other language for that matter). I wish I had taken a class called "Critical Approaches to Renaissance Studies" or the like, and would love to teach a class like that one day. So I thought you might have ideas.
If you were teaching a grad course to people going into Ren Lit as their specialty, what would you include? What are the groundbreaking articles and books in the field? Which critical approaches might a grad student choose in their further study?
2 comments:
Amstr,
I've been thinking about this in between courses and writing. I imagine examples will trickle in over the next few days, but a few come to mind now.
The first is David Norbrook's Epilogue in the updated version of his _Poetry and Politics_. It is a wonderful survey of the last fifty years of Renaissance criticism outlined in a succinct and convincing way.
Peter Stallybrass and Margreta DeGrazia's introduction to their collection _Subject and Object in the Renaissance_ was groundbreaking in the way they resituated the thinking about those two categories.
Habermas started something when he proposed the idea of the 'public sphere.' Since his study, critics have begun to apply his originally 18th century creation to earlier and earlier periods. Peter Lake and Stephen Pinkus' "Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England" is a great summary and addition to a lively debate around if/when the construction of a public sphere, where authors/subjects began to envision a group of interested and participatory citizens, developed.
Speaking of shifts of power from the monarch to the people (so to speak), another major study that has contributed much to early modern studies is Patrick Collinson's study "The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I." There he suggested that during the 1580s, when threats against the Queen proliferated, Cecil and the Privy Council constructed contingency plans about what to do if she was killed; what it amounted to was suggesting that the nation began to develop "republican" ideals. A great survey of the work that emerged from that assertion is John McDiarmid's _Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England_, especially McDiarmid's Introduction.
Another major area of growing research is the history of the book (Joe's specialty). Zach Lesser's book on the publication of plays offers a useful application of that research; and an excellent resource about this research is the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (vols. 3 and 4).
That's what I've got so far. I'll add more if they come.
Any you can't live without?
Hey Kevin,
Thanks for the list! I'm not sure I have much to add, even. I didn't take any lit before 1800 for my undergrad, and took just one pre-18th C. class for my MA (Ren. Lit, of course). Many days I ask how I ended up doing Ren Lit (the answer is FQ). So I feel woefully behind about Ren. Criticism.
I suppose Mary Thomas Crane's _Shakespeare's Brain_ (esp. the intro) for Cognitive Theory (though it's not a huge field, it's at least an interesting trend).
The names I heard a lot: Greenblatt's _Renaissance Self-Fashioning_. Probably C.S. Lewis's book on 16th C for an 'early' perspective. (Though I haven't read either.) Maybe Woodbridge's _Women and the English Renaissance_.
The branches of theory that come to mind: Feminism, Cultural Materialism, New Historicism (of course), Historicism, Queer Theory (maybe Bray and Traub here). Any others, if you were going with a topical study?
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