This comprehensive bibliography lists some 500 source texts published in the British Isles or abroad from 1479 to 1660 and more than 2,000 works of secondary literature from 1900 to the present.

Model court conduct in the Renaissance shared many rhetorical features with poetry. Analyzing these stylistic affinities, Professor Javitch shows that the rise of the courtly ideal enhanced the status of poetic art. He suggests a new explanation for the fostering of poetic talents by courtly establishments and proposes that the court stimulated these talents more decisively than the Renaissance school. The author focuses on late Tudor England and considers how Queen Elizabeth's court helped poetry gain strength by subscribing to a code of behavior as artificial as that prescribed by Castiglione. Elizabethan writers, however, could benefit from the court's example only so long as their contemporaries continued to respect its social and moral authority. The author shows how the weakening of the courtly ideal led eventually to the poet's emergence as the maker of manners, a role first subtly indicated by Spenser in the Sixth Book of The Faerie Queene. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

James Biester sees the shift in late Elizabethan England toward a witty, rough, and obscure lyric style--metaphysical wit and strong lines--as a response to the heightened cultural prestige of wonder. That same prestige was demonstrated in the search for strange artifacts and animals to display in the wonder-cabinets of the period. By embracing the genres of satire and epigram, poets of the Elizabethan court risked their chances for political advancement, exposing themselves to the danger of being classified either as malcontents or as jesters who lacked the gravitas required of those in power. John Donne himself recognized both the risks and benefits of adopting the "admirable" style, as Biester shows in his close readings of the First and Fourth Satyres. Why did courtier-poets adopt such a dangerous form of self-representation? The answer, Biester maintains, lies in an extraordinary confluence of developments in both poetics and the interpenetrating spheres of the culture at large, which made the pursuit of wonder through style unusually attractive, even necessary. In a postfeudal but still aristocratic culture, he says, the ability to astound through language performed the validating function that was once supplied by the ability to fight. Combining the insights of the new historicism with traditional literary scholarship, Biester perceives the rise of metaphysical style as a social as well as aesthetic event.

For early modern authors, the meaning of invention lay between the classical world's omnipresent notion of imitation and what would later become Romantic ideals of genius and originality. In that sense, their era was a transitional phase, smoothing the passage from the classical notion of poetry as imitation to the understanding of literature as the product of the author's creative imagination and original thought. Yet a great conceptual richness lay in this intermediate position, capturing many of the political, religious and social tensions of the Renaissance. Rocío G. Sumillera is Associate Professor at the Universidad de Granada.

This important contribution to the study of English Renaissance culture redefines the humanist movement, employs humanist rhetoric in new ways, and argues that English fiction in the sixteenth century should be seen as a major genre with its own strategies for the imaginative artist. Arthur F. Kinney argues that the main purpose of Renaissance humanism was the cultivation and perfection of the individual and society by the use of rhetoric?by persuasion. Humanist poetics, then, is the poetics of rhetoric: the attempt to fashion the self or the reader by a fiction that employs rhetoric's means. By tracing classical resources and the intertextuality of major English works from More's Utopia to Lodge's Rosalynde and Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, Kinney not only locates basic Elizabethan habits of mind but also shows where the roots of the English novel may ultimately lie.

Back in print after 17 years, this is a concise history of rhetoric as it relates to structure, genre, and style, with special reference to English literature and literary criticism from Ancient Greece to the end of the 18th century. The core of the book is a quite original argument that the figures of rhetoric were not mere mechanical devices, were not, as many believed, a "nuisance, a quite sterile appendage to rhetoric to which (unaccountably) teachers, pupils, and writers all over the world devoted much labor for over 2,000 years." Rather, Vickers demonstrates, rhetoric was a stylized representation of language and human feelings. Vickers supplements his argument through analyses of the rhetorical and emotional structure of four Renaissance poems. He also defines 16 of the most common figures of rhetoric, citing examples from the classics, the Bible, and major English poets from Chaucer to Pope.

The turn of the seventeenth century was an important moment in the history of English criticism. In a series of pioneering works of rhetoric and poetics, writers such as Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, and Ben Jonson laid the foundations of critical discourse in English, and the English word "critic" began, for the first time, to suggest expertise in literary judgment. Yet the conspicuously ambivalent attitude of these critics toward criticism—and the persistent fear that they would be misunderstood, marginalized, scapegoated, or otherwise "branded with the dignity of a critic"—suggests that the position of the critic in this period was uncertain. In Inventing the Critic in Renaissance England, William Russell reveals that the critics of the English Renaissance did not passively absorb their practice from Continental and classical sources but actively invented it in response to a confluence of social and intellectual factors. Distributed for UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Since Jacob Burckhardt's Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1869) rhetoric as a significant cultural factor of the renaissance has largely been neglected. The present study seeks to remedy this deficit regarding the arts by concentrating on literary theory and its aspects of imagination (inventio), genre (dispositio of the genera), style (elocutio), mnemonic architecture (memoria) and representation (actio), with illustrative examples taken from Shakespeare's works, but also on the intermedial rhetoric of painting and music. Particular attention is given to the rhetorical ideology of the Renaissance.

The most comprehensive collection of essays on Renaissance poetry on the market Covering the period 1520–1680, A Companion to Renaissance Poetry offers 46 essays which present an in-depth account of the context, production, and interpretation of early modern British poetry. It provides students with a deep appreciation for, and sensitivity toward, the ways in which poets of the period understood and fashioned a distinctly vernacular voice, while engaging them with some of the debates and departures that are currently animating the discipline. A Companion to Renaissance Poetry analyzes the historical, cultural, political, and religious background of the time, addressing issues such as education, translation, the Reformation, theorizations of poetry, and more. The book immerses readers in non-dramatic poetry from Wyatt to Milton, focusing on the key poetic genres—epic, lyric, complaint, elegy, epistle, pastoral, satire, and religious poetry. It also offers an inclusive account of the poetic production of the period by canonical and less canonical writers, female and male. Finally, it offers examples of current developments in the interpretation of Renaissance poetry, including economic, ecological, scientific, materialist, and formalist approaches. • Covers a wide selection of authors and texts • Features contributions from notable authors, scholars, and critics across the globe • Offers a substantial section on recent and developing approaches to reading Renaissance poetry A Companion to Renaissance Poetry is an ideal resource for all students and scholars of the literature and culture of the Renaissance period.

This book provides examples of the best modern scholarship on rhetoric in the renaissance. Lawrence Green, Lisa Jardine, Kees Meerhoff, Dilwyn Knox, Brian Vickers, George Hunter, Peter Mack, David Norbrook and Pat Rubin look at the reception of Aristotle's Rhetoric in the renaissance; the place of rhetoric in Erasmus's career, Melanchthon's teaching, and sixteenth century protestant schools; the rhetoric textbook; the use of rhetoric in Raphael, renaissance drama, Elizabethan romance, and seventeenth century political writing. It will become essential reading for advanced studies in English, rhetoric, art history, history, history of education, history of ideas, political theory, and reformation history.