The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 3, The Renaissance


Book Description

This 1999 volume was the first to explore as part of an unbroken continuum the critical legacy both of the humanist rediscovery of ancient learning and of its neoclassical reformulation. Focused on what is arguably the most complex phase in the transmission of the Western literary-critical heritage, the book encompasses those issues that helped shape the way European writers thought about literature from the late Middle Ages to the late seventeenth century. These issues touched almost every facet of Western intellectual endeavour, as well as the historical, cultural, social, scientific, and technological contexts in which that activity evolved. From the interpretative reassessment of the major ancient poetic texts, this volume addresses the emergence of the literary critic in Europe by exploring poetics, prose fiction, contexts of criticism, neoclassicism, and national developments. Sixty-one chapters by internationally respected scholars are supported by an introduction, detailed bibliographies for further investigation and a full index.




Pleasurable Instruction


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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.







The Works of Spenser


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Patterns and Patterning


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The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems of Jane Barker


Book Description

Novelist, poet, manager of farm property, convert to Roman Catholicism, Jacobite in exile in France, and woman unmarried by choice, Jane Barker (1652-1732) wrote on a remarkable variety of subjects and displayed an equally remarkable variety of genres. Her multifaceted work is important in understanding the woman artist, the shifting literary marketplace, and the response of women to a society torn apart by endless wars, religious intolerance, and a legal and economic system that consistently disadvantaged them. Love Intrigues (1713), A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) and The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen (1726), the three novels that comprise The Galesia Trilogy, attest to her talents. In all three works, Galesia is Barker's semi- autobiographical narrator and heroine, whose voice becomes like that of a friend to the reader. The first work, an anti-romance celebrated for its psychological realism, captures the confusion and ambivalence of the young Galesia as she is courted by her rakish cousin. The second and third works include a dynamic range of pieces: popular tales of seduced nuns and lust for the high life in London, and more personal poems about Galesia's choice of the artistic life and her practice of the healing arts. Barker brilliantly structures the narratives of the second and third novels as an embroidered patchwork screen, worked harmoniously by a community of women, to which Galesia stitches her artistic productions. This literary conceit, Barker asserts, equals anything developed by her male contemporaries in conveying the truths of human experience. Following the Trilogy, this edition includes several Barker poems, never before published, which prove particularly powerful in capturing life in exile after James II was deposed from the English throne by William of Orange in 1688. This latest addition to the Women Writers in English series will have strong appeal for scholars working in the history of the novel and the literary marketplace, Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, women's history, and the relation of women's textile arts to imaginative literature.