The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)
Cambridge University Press, 6/28/1997
EAN 9780521441124, ISBN10: 0521441129
Hardcover, 220 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm
Language: English
What were the possibilities of prose as a literary medium in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? And how did it operate in the literary and social world? The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World brings together ten essays by leading scholars of the literatures of England, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, and the colonial Americas, to answer these questions in wide-ranging ways. Several of the essays shed light on landmark prose works of the period; some discuss what lesser-known writings reveal about the medium; others move between the literary and the non-literary to reflect on the medium's intersections with history, fiction, subjectivity, the state, science and other aspects of social and cultural life. Overall, this 1997 collection will provoke an international reconsideration of the remarkable visibility and diversity of the medium of prose in the early modern period.
List of illustrations
Notes on the contributors
1. Introduction
the project of prose and early modern literary studies Roland Greene and Elizabeth Fowler
2. Cannibal, cartographer, soldier, spy
the peirai of Mendes Pinto's Peregrinação Ronald W. Sousa
3. 'niu ureiting'
the prose of language reform in the English Renaissance Paula Blank
4. Relations of prose
knights errant in the archives of early modern Italy Stephanie H. Jed
5. Opening gates and stopping hedges
Grafton, Stow and the politics of Elizabethan history writing David Scott Kastan
6. The subject of America
history and alterity in Montaigne's 'Des Coches' Timothy Hampton
7. Anatomizing the commonwealth
language, politics and the Elizabethan social order William H. Sherman
8. From polemical prose to the Red Bull
the Swetnam controversy in women-voiced pamphlets and the public theatre Ann Rosalind Jones
9. Bacon's New Atlantis and the laboratory of prose Amy Boesky
10. History, law and the eyewitness
protocols of authority in Bernal DÃÂaz del Castillo's Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España Rolena Adorno
11. Fictions of immanence, fictions of embassy Roland Greene
Index.
"...they have given teachers and scholars an attractive and useful collection; this reviewer knows of no closely parallel volume. Recommended for graduate and research collections." E.D. Hill, Choice