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Description of  Reading the Renaissance: Ideas and Idioms from Shakespeare to Milton (Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies)

0820703362 pdf Reading the Renaissance is a timely and compelling answer to a decades-long attack on literature by various schools of critical theory. A collection of new and provocative essays by prominent scholars, it speaks eloquently to the enduring value of Renaissance literature and literary study. Reading Renaissance literature requires what Edward W. Tayler calls literary tact, the willingness to allow poets their own ideas. A reader might best come to understand Renaissance writers by attending, again and again, to their ideas, idioms, and intentions. Reading, writes Marc Berley, is a dangerous act, for how we confront anothers genius reveals much about ourselves. The contributors hereFrank Kermode, Marc Berley, Michael Mack, Louis L. Martz, Albert C. Labriola, Anne Lake Prescott, Stanley Stewart, Ernest B. Gilman, Martin Elsky, Anthony Low, Edward W. Taylerhold that the author, not the critic, is supreme, that the aim of a reader should be, as Ben Jonson urged, to understand. These scholars focus on the various Renaissance authors they consider, not contemporary theories or schools that might seem to offer totalizing safety. They are committed to the thrill of reading the Renaissancenot the power of rewriting it. This commitment, not coincidentally, leads them to authoritative new readings of major texts. Read more