English Fiction & Prose Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Renaissance - History, Italian Poetry - Literary Criticism, Literary Theory - General & Miscellaneous, General & Miscellaneous

The English Renaissance

Name: The English Renaissance
Author: Alistair Fox
ISBN: 9780631177470

by Alistair Fox

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Overview

This book reassesses Renaissance English literature and its place in Elizabethan society. It examines, in particular, the role of Italianate literary imitation in addressing the ethical and political issues of the sixteenth century. In doing so, it reveals the significance of the Calvinist discourse of English Protestantism as a stimulus to literary creation. It demonstrates how the clash between the values of the Continental system from which England was separating and the assumptions of the Elizabethan religious Settlement of 1559 prompted writers to use creative imitation as a means of exploring the problematical relationship between the two. The author shows how imitation of Italianate literary culture had a much greater influence on the formation of modern English identity than has been hitherto supposed. He demonstrates that it also invested Renaissance English literature with many of its most characteristic attributes. Above all, the English Renaissance and Reformation are shown to be far more closely linked than previous scholars have recognized.

About the Author, Alistair Fox

Alistair Fox was educated at the University of Canterbury (MA) and the University of Western Ontario, where he took his doctorate as a Commonwealth Scholar. He has held visiting fellowships at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and All Souls College, Oxford, and is currently Professor of English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His previous books include Thomas More: History and Providence (1982); Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics, and Reform, 1500-1550 (with John Guy) (1986); Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (1989); and Utopia: An Elusive Vision (1993).