English Renaissance Literary Criticism - Hardcover

Well-conceived and well-tuned anthology ... informative introduction ... this book will become an indispensable source for scholars, theoreticians of literature, university professors, writers, and nonacademic readers for as long as our interest in Renaissance studies continues. (In-between, Essays & Studies in Literary Criticism)

He [Vickers] illuminates the classical background to his texts with particular clarity ... This richly rewarding collection is a worthy successor to the classic anthologies of Gregory Smith and J. E. Spingarn. (English Studies)

Vickers's splendid, fifty-five page introduction puts his selection in context, tracing its application of the dazzling variety of classical rhetoric. This must be one of the most pithily compressed accounts ever attempted of criticism as applied to rhetoric. (Alastair Fowler, Times Literary Supplement)

Vickers's Notes are a model of pertinence and economy. They not only adduce a wide variety of ancient sources, but ascribe these discriminatingly, in accordance with modern scholarship. (Alastair Fowler, Times Literary Supplement)

This excellent anthology can be recommended with very few reservations. Let us hope it will be followed by a second volume continuing the selection into the seventeenth century. (Alastair Fowler, Times Literary Supplement)

English Renaissance Literary Criticism may well become the standard reference collection ... the greatest coup is John Ford's elegy on John Fletcher, discovered by the late Jeremy Maule and printed here for the first time. (Alastair Fowler, Times Literary Supplement)

This is the first comprehensive collection of English Renaissance literary criticism to appear for nearly a century. Brian Vickers has brought together a wide-ranging selection of texts, some well-known (such as Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry, the most brilliant critical essay of the whole Renaissance, here given complete), some little-known (Dudley North's account of Metaphysical poetry), and one being printed for the first time (John Ford's elegy on John Fletcher).