Formal Matters: Reading the Materials of English Renaissance Literature - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Allison K. Deutermann is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York.

András Kiséry is Assistant Professor of English at The City College of New York, City University of New York.

Allison K. Deutermann is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York
András Kiséry is Assistant Professor of English at The City College of New York, City University of New York

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Formal matters: Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature explores the intersection between literary and material forms of writing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. How do the formal properties of early modern texts, together with the materials that envelop and shape them, relate to the cultural, political, and social world of their production? The essays in this collection answer this question by uniting two distinct, even oppositional, methodologies that have transformed literary studies over the past decade: a renewed interest in formalist analysis and the broad acceptance of the study of the material text as central to the discipline. The present volume shows what is to be gained by linking formalist analysis with the insights of book history, thus representing the new English Renaissance literary historiography that links literary composition to the materials and material practices of writing. Formal matters brings together studies of familiar and lesser known texts, from the poems and plays of Shakespeare to jests and printed commonplace books, and from the works of Philip Sidney and Thomas Middleton to Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations. The ten featured studies make important, original contributions to research on the genres of early modern literature, focusing on the involvement of literary forms in the scribal and print cultures of compilation, continuation, translation, and correspondence, as well as in matters of political republicanism, of popular piety and of geometry, among others. Taken together, the essays in this collection exemplify how an attention to form and matter can historicise writing without abandoning a literary focus.