Essays on English Renaissance culture make a major contribution to the debate on historical method. For nearly two decades, Renaissance literary scholarship has been dominated by various forms of postmodern criticism which claim to expose the simplistic methodology of `traditional' criticism and to offer a more sophisticated view of the relation between literature and history; however, this new approach, although making scholars more alert to the political significance of literary texts, has been widely criticised on both methodological and theoretical grounds. The revisionist essays collected in this volume make a major contribution to the modern debate on historical method, approaching Renaissance culture from different gender perspectives and a variety of political standpoints, but all sharing an interest in the interdisciplinary study of the past.ROBIN HEADLAM WELLS is Professor of English, University of Surrey Roehampton; GLENN BURGESS is Professor of History, University of Hull; ROWLAND WYMER is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. Contributors: GLENN BURGESS, STANLEY STEWART, BLAIR WORDEN, ANDREW GURR, KATHARINE EISAMAN MAUS, ROWLAND WYMER, GRAHAM PARRY, MALCOLM SMUTS, STEVEN ZWICKER, HEATHER DUBROW,ROBIN HEADLAM WELLS.

This study, first published in 1982, explores and demonstrates the ways in which an awareness of literary genre can illuminate works as diverse as Milton's 'Lycidas' and Berryman's Sonnets. The first book to offer a historical survey of genre theory, it traces the history from the Greek rhetoricians to such contemporary figures as Frye and Todorov. Particular emphasis is placed on the ways in which comments on genre reflect underlying aesthetic attitudes.

This study, first published in 1982, explores and demonstrates the ways in which an awareness of literary genre can illuminate works as diverse as Milton's 'Lycidas' and Berryman's Sonnets. The first book to offer a historical survey of genre theory, it traces the history from the Greek rhetoricians to such contemporary figures as Frye and Todorov. Particular emphasis is placed on the ways in which comments on genre reflect underlying aesthetic attitudes.

This 1999 book re-examines some of Shakespeare's best-known texts in the light of their engagement with the forms of deprivation which threatened domestic security in early modern England. Burglary, the loss of home, and the early deaths of parents emerge as central and very telling issues in Shakespearean drama. Heather Dubrow recovers the particular significance of home, especially in relation to gender, male and female subjectivity. She relates the plays to Shakespeare's poetry (The Rape of Lucrece), and to early modern cultural texts such as the literature of roguery; she also introduces illuminating perspectives from contemporary social problems (notably crime), twentieth-century poetry, and popular culture. One of the most vital aspects of this fascinating study is to connect concerns at the cutting edge of cultural studies (such as the construction of transgressive Others) to more traditional literary concerns such as genre, especially the workings of romance and pastoral.

As a literary mode "lyric" is difficult to define precisely. While the term has conventionally been applied to brief, songlike poems expressing the speaker's interior thoughts critics have questioned many of the assumptions underlying this definition, calling into doubt the very possibility of self-expression in language.

Whereas much recent scholarship on lyric has centered on the Romantic era, Heather Dubrow turns instead to the poetry of early modern England. "The Challenges of Orpheus" confronts widespread assumptions about lyric, exploring such topics as its relationship to its audiences, the impact of material conditions of production and other cultural pressures, lyric's negotiations of gender, and the interactions and tensions between lyric and narrative.

Offering fresh perspectives on major texts of the period--from Wyatt's "My lute awake" to Milton's Nativity Ode--as well as poems by lesser-known figures, Dubrow extends her critical conclusions to poetry in other historical periods and to the relationship between creative writers and critics, recommending new directions for the study of lyric and of genre.

The Historical Renaissance both exemplifies and examines the most influential current in contemporary studies of the English Renaissance: the effort to analyze the interplay between literature, history, and politics. The broad and varied manifestations of that effort are reflected in the scope of this collection. Rather than merely providing a sampler of any single critical movement, The Historical Renaissance represents the range of ways scholars and critics are fusing what many would once have distinguished as literary and historical concerns The volume includes studies of mid-Tudor culture as well as of Elizabethan and Stuart periods. The scope of the collection is also manifest in its list of contributors. They include historians and literary critics, and their work spans he spectrum from more traditional methods to those characteristic of what has been termed New Historicism.One aim of the book is to investigate the apparent division between these older and more current approaches. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier evaluate the contemporary interest in historical studies of the Renaissance, relating it to previous developments in the field, surveying its achievements and limitations, and suggesting new directions for future work.

This 1999 book re-examines some of Shakespeare's best-known texts in the light of their engagement with the forms of deprivation which threatened domestic security in early modern England. Burglary, the loss of home, and the early deaths of parents emerge as central and very telling issues in Shakespearean drama. Heather Dubrow recovers the particular significance of home, especially in relation to gender, male and female subjectivity. She relates the plays to Shakespeare's poetry (The Rape of Lucrece), and to early modern cultural texts such as the literature of roguery; she also introduces illuminating perspectives from contemporary social problems (notably crime), twentieth-century poetry, and popular culture. One of the most vital aspects of this fascinating study is to connect concerns at the cutting edge of cultural studies (such as the construction of transgressive Others) to more traditional literary concerns such as genre, especially the workings of romance and pastoral.

Echoes of Desire variously invokes and interrogates a number of historicist and feminist premises about Tudor and Stuart literature by examining the connections between the anti-Petrarchan tradition and mainstream Petrarchan poetry. It also addresses some of the broader implications of contemporary critical methodologies. Heather Dubrow offers an alternative to the two predominant models used in previous treatments of Petrarchism: the all-powerful poet and silenced mistress on the one hand and the poet as subservient patron on the other.