Bringing together some of the best current practitioners of historical and formal criticism, Reading Renaissance Ethics assesses the ethical performance of renaissance texts as historical agents in their time and in ours.

Exploring the nature and mechanics of cultural agency, the book explains with greater clarity just what is at stake when canon-formation, aesthetic evaluation and curricular reform are questioned and revised. Taking seriously the question of what to read requires us to consider exactly what it is that we do when we read and when we write about our reading. Reading Renaissance Ethics asks what sorts of events took place when Renaissance texts were first read and how this differs from the way we read and teach them now.

Grossman examines the narrative form of Paradise Lost to discover Milton's thoroughly modern concept of self. Banished from paradise, the epic poem's protagonists become "authors to themselves in all/Both what they judge and what they choose," left to create their own story in relation to the story already written by God. Grossman believes the resulting structure of the poem must be understood in the context of seventeenth-century historical and theological developments, specifically Bacon's notion of history as progress and Protestant theology's notion of the inner voice. The book draws upon recent works in hermeneutics and analytic history to develop the argument that there is a common structure to the experience of time in action and in narrative. In developing this thesis, Grossman draws on the work Stephen Greenblatt, Ricoeur, Todorov, Genette, Derrida, and Lacan to construct an original reading of Paradise Lost that will fascinate Miltonists, specialists in seventeenth-century literature, and readers concerned with narrative theory.

Grossman examines the narrative form of Paradise Lost to discover Milton's thoroughly modern concept of self. Banished from paradise, the epic poem's protagonists become "authors to themselves in all/Both what they judge and what they choose," left to create their own story in relation to the story already written by God. Grossman believes the resulting structure of the poem must be understood in the context of seventeenth-century historical and theological developments, specifically Bacon's notion of history as progress and Protestant theology's notion of the inner voice. The book draws upon recent works in hermeneutics and analytic history to develop the argument that there is a common structure to the experience of time in action and in narrative. In developing this thesis, Grossman draws on the work Stephen Greenblatt, Ricoeur, Todorov, Genette, Derrida, and Lacan to construct an original reading of Paradise Lost that will fascinate Miltonists, specialists in seventeenth-century literature, and readers concerned with narrative theory.

Aemilia Lanyer was a Londoner of Jewish-Italian descent and the mistress of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chamberlain. But in 1611 she did something extraordinary for a middle-class woman of the seventeenth century: she published a volume of original poems.

Using standard genres to address distinctly feminine concerns, Lanyer's work is varied, subtle, provocative, and witty. Her religious poem "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum" repeatedly projects a female subject for a female reader and casts the Passion in terms of gender conflict. Lanyer also carried this concern with gender into the very structure of the poem; whereas a work of praise usually held up the superiority of its patrons, the good women in Lanyer's poem exemplify worth women in general.

The essays in this volume establish the facts of Lanyer's life and use her poetry to interrogate that of her male contemporaries, Donne, Jonson, and Shakespeare. Lanyer's work sheds light on views of gender and class identities in early modern society. By using Lanyer to look at the larger issues of women writers working within a patriarchal system, the authors go beyond the explication of Lanyer's writing to address the dynamics of canonization and the construction of literary history.

Bringing together some of the best current practitioners of historical and formal criticism, Reading Renaissance Ethics assesses the ethical performance of renaissance texts as historical agents in their time and in ours.

Exploring the nature and mechanics of cultural agency, the book explains with greater clarity just what is at stake when canon-formation, aesthetic evaluation and curricular reform are questioned and revised. Taking seriously the question of what to read requires us to consider exactly what it is that we do when we read and when we write about our reading. Reading Renaissance Ethics asks what sorts of events took place when Renaissance texts were first read and how this differs from the way we read and teach them now.

In The Story of All Things Marshall Grossman analyzes the influence of major cultural developments, as well as significant events in the lives of Renaissance poets, to show how specific narratives characterize distinctive conceptions of the self in relation to historical action. To explore these conceptions of the self, Grossman focuses on the narrative poetry in the English Renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Relating subjectivity to the nature of language, Grossman uses the theories of Lacan to analyze the concept of the self as it encounters a transforming environment. He shows how ideological tensions arose from the reorganization and modernization of social life in revolutionary England and how the major poets of the time represented the division of the self in writings that are suspended between lyric and narrative genres. Beginning with the portrayals of the self inherited from Augustine, Dante, and Petrarch, he describes the influence of historic developments such as innovations in agricultural technology, civil war and regicide, and the emergence of republican state institutions on the changing representation of characters in the works of Spenser, Donne, Marvell, and Milton. Furthering this psychoanalytic critique of literary history, Grossman probes the linguistic effects of social and personal factors such as Augustine's strained relationship with his mother and the marital disharmony of Milton and Mary Powell. With its focus on these and other literary historical events, The Story of All Things not only proposes a new structural theory of narrative but constitutes a significant challenge to New Historicist conceptions of the self.