To Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, and other Elizabethans, the minor epic was an important medium for poetic experimentation, but today, too often separated from the culture that bore it, it is not well understood. This author examines the form of the minor epic and its place in Elizabethan literary culture. Particularly, he explores the concept of metamorphosis as it shapes the minor epic at every level; in its subject matter, narrative technique, imagery, reworking of traditional materials, mixing of literary genres, and power to transform the poet. Combining close reading with literary theory, Professor Hulse approaches the minor epic as a mixed genre, exploring the idea of genre itself as well as the particular genres that contributed to the minor epics, including the sonnet, satire, Ovidian epic, pastoral, and primeval poetry. He also discusses wider issues, such as poetic inspiration, fictionality, and the nature of literary history; and takes up painting and historiography to show how they use the same narrative materials in different ways and to different ends. In the process he redefines Elizabethan literature as a fluid system, characterized by multiplicity of form and style and the poet's search for growth. Clark Hulse is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. Originally published in 1982. 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.

To Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, and other Elizabethans, the minor epic was an important medium for poetic experimentation, but today, too often separated from the culture that bore it, it is not well understood. This author examines the form of the minor epic and its place in Elizabethan literary culture. Particularly, he explores the concept of metamorphosis as it shapes the minor epic at every level; in its subject matter, narrative technique, imagery, reworking of traditional materials, mixing of literary genres, and power to transform the poet. Combining close reading with literary theory, Professor Hulse approaches the minor epic as a mixed genre, exploring the idea of genre itself as well as the particular genres that contributed to the minor epics, including the sonnet, satire, Ovidian epic, pastoral, and primeval poetry. He also discusses wider issues, such as poetic inspiration, fictionality, and the nature of literary history; and takes up painting and historiography to show how they use the same narrative materials in different ways and to different ends. In the process he redefines Elizabethan literature as a fluid system, characterized by multiplicity of form and style and the poet's search for growth. Clark Hulse is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. Originally published in 1982. 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.

Poetry 101 Whether in cities celestial To the reader of this book,Or in towns terrestrial, (Whether it be on shelf or in nook)HIS ideas are superb Of this book I must say,For home and suburb. "There are 101 poems in this way." That Man's title? Yes, it takes a thinking manThat Man's name? To understand the poet's plan:My Lord and My Savior: Words with a magnitudeOne in the same. To inspire awe and gratitude. He was sent to Galilee That poet's name?But I born in Kentucky. That poet's title?This book is in your sight: Some call me Snowflake;Discover its soul and might. Some call me Kendall. This book contains the following features: But I am not the Master Poet1.) Aesthetically pleasing 1.5 spacing Nor the Master Architect;between lines of poetry, HIS ideas (don't you know it?)2.) Chapter divisions between its 5 groups I merely reflect.of poetry, 3.) Preface to those chapters of poetry, In short, this book4.) Table-of-contents of styles of Is a mix of poetry,poetry used in this book, Written to edify and make merry5.) Index of poem titles, People like you and me,6.) Introductory information for each poem of this book [excluding Written to expound"Poetry 101", which is on this The merits of intimacy, page], and a And to glorify and praise7.) Glossary of the terms and obscure The God which be.poetic language used in this book.

For sublimity and philosophical grandeur Milton stands almost alone in world literature. His peers are Homer, Virgil, Dante, Wordsworth, and Goethe. Gordon Teskey shows how Milton’s aesthetic joins beauty to truth and value to ethics and how he rediscovers the art of poetry as a way of thinking in the world as it is, and for the world as it can be.

Tracing the development of narrative verse in London's literary circles during the 1590s, this volume puts Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece into conversation with poems by a wide variety of contemporary writers, including Thomas Lodge, Francis Beaumont, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Campion and Edmund Spenser. Chapters investigate the complexities of this literary conversation and contribute for the current, vigorous reassessment of humanism's intended consequences by drawing attention to the highly diverse forms of early modern classicism as well as the complex connection between Latin pedagogy and vernacular poetic invention. Key themes and topics include: -Epyllia, masculinity and sexuality -Classicism and commerce -Genre and mimesis -Rhetoric and aesthetics

In War, Liberty, and Caesar, Edward Paleit discusses how readers and writers of the English Renaissance read and understood Lucan's epic poem on the Roman civil wars. Looking at engagements with Lucan across a wide variety of literary forms, Paleit questions what made this Latin author so relevant during this period.

Redefining Elizabethan Literature examines the new definitions of literature and authorship that emerged in one of the most remarkable decades in English literary history, the 1590s. Georgia Brown analyses the period's obsession with shame as both a literary theme and a conscious authorial position. She explores the related obsession of this generation of authors with fragmentary and marginal forms of expression, such as the epyllion, paradoxical encomium, sonnet sequence, and complaint. Combining developments in literary theory with close readings of a wide range of Elizabethan texts, Brown casts light on the wholesale eroticisation of Elizabethan literary culture, the form and meaning of Englishness, the function of gender and sexuality in establishing literary authority, and the contexts of the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser and Sidney. This study will be of great interest to scholars of Renaissance literature as well as cultural history and gender studies.

The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures, 1603-1721 presents together, for the first time, modernized versions of ten of the most poignant of plague poems in the English language - each composed in heroic verse and responding to the urgent need to justify the ways of God in times of social, religious, and political upheaval. Showcasing unusual combinations of passion and restraint, heart-rending lamentation and nation-building fervor, these poems function as literary memorials to the plague-time fallen. In an extended introduction, Rebecca Totaro makes the case that these poems belong to a distinct literary genre that she calls the 'plague epic.' Because the poems are formally and thematically related to Milton's great epics Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, this volume represents a rare discovery of previously unidentified sources of great value for Milton studies and scholarly research into the epic, didactic verse, cultural studies of the seventeenth century, illness as metaphor, and interdisciplinary approaches to illness, natural disaster, trauma, and memory.

Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid contributes to our understanding of the Roman poet Ovid, the Renaissance writer Milton, and more broadly the transmission and transformation of classical traditions through history. It examines the ways in which Milton drew on Ovid's oeuvre, as well as the long tradition of reception that had begun with Ovid himself, and argues that Ovid's revision of the past, and especially his relation to Virgil, gave Renaissance writers a model for their own transformation of classical works. Throughout his career Milton thinks through and with Ovid, whose stories and figures inform his exploration of the limits and possibilities of creativity, change, and freedom. Examining this specific relation between two very individual and different authors, Kilgour also explores the forms and meaning of creative imitation. Intertextuality was not only central to the two writers' poetic practices but helped shape their visions of the world. While many critics seek to establish how Milton read Ovid, Kilgour debates the broader question of why does considering how Milton read Ovid matter? How do our readings of this relation change our understanding of both Milton and Ovid; and does it tell us about how traditions are changed and remade through time?

A group of leading scholars here investigate the varied ways in which the Renaissance incorporated conversation and dialogue into its literary, political, juridical, religious, and social practices. Across a range of texts and genres, the essays focus on the importance of conversation to early modern understandings of ethics; on literary history itself as an ongoing authorial conversation; and on the material and textual technologies that enabled early modern conversations.