A comprehensive and nuanced analysis of how Ovid's poetry gave vigour and vitality to male voices in English Renaissance literature - how his works inspired English writers to reimagine the male ...authorial voice, the male body, desire, and love in fresh terms.
From the fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to In Parenthesis - an epic poem written in 1937 by painter and poet David Jones - English writers have looked to romance as a resource and ...a strategy to expand the imaginary reach of their writing. Rethinking the resilience, purpose, and place of romance in English literature, Timely Voices discusses moments that have altered how we read and interpret this ever-changing form. Addressing the various ways in which romance has absorbed and been absorbed by drama, prose, and poetry, contributors to this volume demonstrate that romance texts do not produce something defined or confined by a static genre, but rather express a repository of creative possibilities. Covering writers including the anonymous author of Sir Orfeo, Jane Austen, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Lucy Hutchinson, William Morris, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, and Edmund Spenser, essays explore the magic and wonder of romance, Irish and Gaelic lore, how woodcuts in early books complement and extend printed text, how romance was dramatized, how it gives language to feminist politics and ideology, and how it becomes a counterpoint to finance in the fiction of the early Romantic period. A nuanced reinterpretation of romance in its own terms, Timely Voices inspires new appreciation of this form as a solution to textual, aesthetic, structural, ideological, and political problems in literature.
Knights in arms Stanivukovic, Goran
Knights in arms,
2016, 20160202, 2016, 2016-02-02, 2016-01-27
eBook
Drawing from medieval chivalric culture, the prose romance was a popular early modern genre featuring stories of courtship, combat, and travel. Flourishing at the same moment as the growing English ...trade with the Eastern Mediterranean, prose romances adopted both Eastern settings and new conceptions of masculinity - commercial rather than chivalric, erotic rather than militant. Knights in Arms moves beyond the best-known examples of the genre, such as Philip Sidney's Arcadia, to consider the broad range of texts which featured the Eastern Mediterranean in this era. Goran Stanivukovic highlights how eroticism within prose romances, particularly homoerotic desire, facilitated commercial, cross-ethnic, and cross-cultural interactions, shaping European knowledge and conceptions of the Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire. Through his careful examination of these lesser known works, Stanivukovic sheds important light on early modern trade, Mediterranean politics, and the changing meaning of masculinity in an age of commercial expansion.
A selection of Shakespeare's sonnets devoted to a young man is discussed alongside the portrait miniatures of young men painted by Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver in the 1590s. Through an analysis ...of the shared properties of style and the analogous structures of representation, visual and textual presentations of the young man in the miniatures and in The Sonnets, respectively, are explored as examples of late Elizabethan aesthetics. A comparative reading of the miniatures and the young man sonnets represents an instance of how Shakespeare thinks ideas in poetry out of an understanding of the ways in which pictures craft meaning. Poems from Fulke Greville's collection Caelica are compared to Shakespeare's sonnets as a possible direction Shakespeare followed in the composition of his collection of amorous sonnets devoted to a young man. The essay concludes with a discussion of the intersection of the social, political and artistic aspects of 1590s aesthetics as the basis of the creative imagination in The Sonnets.
