Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance: Revised Edition - Hardcover

He aims to correct the distortions of history we have all inherited, and in bringing off that ambition he has written a book of exceptional interest. Nothing he discusses will be quite the same again ... This bold, finely researched and well-written book should have a decisive effect on our thinking about the poetry of the English Renaissance. (Frank Kermode,)

The strengths of Norbrook's argument are considerable ... connections between early and later Tudor literatures, and between Elizabethan and Stuart periods, emerge vividly. (Katharine Eisaman Maus, Western Humanities Review)

successfully ambitious ... This book makes better sense than any I know of the relation of poetry in this period to the pre-revolutionary world in which the poets lived. (Christopher Hill, Notes and Queries)

valuable insistence on political content ... Norbrook is far too subtle a critic to imagine that his writers used art merely as a vehicle for political opinions. (Blair Worden, London Review of Books)

He aims to correct the distortions of history we have all inherited, and in bringing off that ambition he has written a book of exceptional interest. Nothing he discusses will be quite the same again ... This bold, finely researched and well-written book should have a decisive effect on our thinking about the poetry of the English Renaissance. (Frank Kermode, Times Literary Supplement)

This is a successfully ambitious book ... makes better sense than any I know of the relation of poetry in this period to the pre-revolutionary world in which the poets lived. (Christopher Hill, Notes and Queries)

For this edition David Norbrook has provided an extensive introduction which gives an overview of developments in methodology and research since the first edition in 1984, responds to some criticisms, and points the way to further inquiry. Footnotes have been updated to take account of the current state of knowledge, and a chronological table has been provided for ease of reference. Norbrook brings out the range and adventurousness of early modern poets' engagements with the public world. The first part of the book establishes the more radical currents of thought shaping Renaissance poetry: civic humanism and apocalyptic Protestantism. Norbrook then shows how such leading Elizabethan poets as Sidney and Spenser, often seen as conservative monarchists, responded powerfully though sometimes ambivalently to more radical ideas. A chapter on Fulke Greville shows how that ambivalence reaches an extreme in some remarkable poetry.