The Renaissance and the Postmodern reconsiders postmodern readings of Renaissance texts by engaging in a dialectics the authors call comparative critical values. Rather than concede the contemporary hierarchy of theory over literature, the book takes the novel approach of consulting major Renaissance writers about the values at work in postmodern representations of early modern culture. As criticism seeks new directions and takes new forms, insufficient attention has been paid to the literary and philosophical values won and lost in the exchanges. One result is that the way we understand the logical connections, the literary textures, and the philosophical impulses that make up the literature of writers like Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton has fundamentally changed. Examining theoretical debates now in light of polemical controversies then, the book goes beyond earlier studies in that it systematically examines the effects of these newer critical approaches across their materialist, historicist, deconstructive, and psychoanalytic manifestations. Bringing gravity and focus to this question of critical continuities and discontinuities, each chapter counterposes one major Renaissance voice with a postmodern one to probe these issues and with them the value of the cultural past. As voices on both sides of the historical divide illuminate key differences between the Renaissance and the Postmodern, a critical model emerges from the book to re-engage this period's humane literature in a contemporary context with intellectual rigor and a renewed sense of cultural enrichment.

The Renaissance and the Postmodern reconsiders postmodern readings of Renaissance texts by engaging in a dialectics the authors call comparative critical values. Rather than concede the contemporary hierarchy of theory over literature, the book takes the novel approach of consulting major Renaissance writers about the values at work in postmodern representations of early modern culture. As criticism seeks new directions and takes new forms, insufficient attention has been paid to the literary and philosophical values won and lost in the exchanges. One result is that the way we understand the logical connections, the literary textures, and the philosophical impulses that make up the literature of writers like Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton has fundamentally changed. Examining theoretical debates now in light of polemical controversies then, the book goes beyond earlier studies in that it systematically examines the effects of these newer critical approaches across their materialist, historicist, deconstructive, and psychoanalytic manifestations. Bringing gravity and focus to this question of critical continuities and discontinuities, each chapter counterposes one major Renaissance voice with a postmodern one to probe these issues and with them the value of the cultural past. As voices on both sides of the historical divide illuminate key differences between the Renaissance and the Postmodern, a critical model emerges from the book to re-engage this period's humane literature in a contemporary context with intellectual rigor and a renewed sense of cultural enrichment.

Renaissance Papers is a collection of the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The nine articles in this volume reflect a wide range of approaches to Renaissance literary performance and theory. The first four essays seek reasons for the success of various Renaissance plays: Christopher Cobb examines how Thomas Heywood casts heroic action in a positive light in his romantic dramas, whereas Lucas Erne urges that Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy owes its success to its Christian portrait of Heironimo's unsuccessful attempt to recognize a benevolent deity. Robert Reeder looks at Renaissance educational manuals in order to clarify views on precocity in Richard III, Bartholomew Fair, and Twelfth Night; and Thomas L. Martin and Duke Pesta investigate and refute postmodern claims about a "transvestite stage." Scott Lucas shows how several sonnets of Fulke Greville's Caelica disorient the reader, underscoring the poet's doubts about human reason and perception; and Pamela Macfie illustrates how Marlowe's ghostly allusions to Ovid's Heroides in Hero and Leander darken the portrayal of the tragic lovers' frustration. The final three essays concern the 17th-century literary giants Donne and Milton: Jay Stubblefield shows Donne's 1619 sermon to the Virginia Company to be a uniquely Thomistic commentary on the conflicting motives behind England's exploits in the New World; and John Wall and John T. Shawcross explore the effects of John Milton's poems on Renaissance and modern readers. M. Thomas Hester is professor of English at North Carolina State University.