Front cover image for Soliciting interpretation : literary theory and seventeenth-century English poetry

Soliciting interpretation : literary theory and seventeenth-century English poetry

This collection gathers new essays by critics and scholars who are currently reshaping our sense of the function and nature of seventeenth-century poetry. Contributors return to the New Critical canon of Renaissance poetry with fresh perspectives that emphasize considerations of gender, ideology, power, and language. In the first group of essays, David Norbrook, Annabel Patterson, John Guillory, Rosemary Kegl, and Stephen Orgel explore the various ways in which a text can be "political." Next, Arthur Marotti, Jane Tylus, and Jonathan Goldberg consider the circumstances of textual production and reception in the seventeenth century. Finally, Stanley Fish, Gordon Braden, Michael C. Schoenfeldt, and Maureen Quilligan discuss the particular forms of anxiety that result when seventeenth-century poets modify the traditional rhetoric of sexual desire to serve what seem to be erotic or religious purposes. These essays, accompanied by an extensive editors' introduction, intersect less in their shared enthusiasm for particular authors or interpretative methods than in a common interest in particular critical issues. They present the most exciting work by critics redefining Renaissance studies
Print Book, English, 1990
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xxiii, 351 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780226318752, 9780226318769, 9780226319575, 9780226319599, 0226318753, 0226318761, 0226319571, 0226319598
20932330
The monarchy of wit and the republic of letters: Donne's politics / David Norbrook
All Donne / Annabel Patterson
From the superfluous to the supernumerary: reading gender into Paradise lost / John Guillory
Joyning my labour to my pain: the politics of labor in Marvell's mower poems / Rosemary Kegl
Jonson and the amazons / Stephen Orgel
Shakespeare's sonnets as literary property / Arthur F. Marotti
Jacobean poetry and lyric disappointment / Jane Tylus
Dating Milton / Jonathan Goldberg
Masculine persuasive force: Donne and verbal power / Stanley Fish
Unspeakable love: Petrarch to Herbert / Gordon Braden
That ancient heat: sexuality and spirituality in The temple / Michael C. Schoenfeldt
The constant subject: instability and authority in Wroth's Urania poems / Maureen Quilligan