Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590–1674
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Published:1st Dec '16
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Munro explores the conscious use of archaic language by poets and dramatists including Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson and Milton.
Lucy Munro presents a wide-ranging study of literary style, exploring the conscious use of archaic language by poets and dramatists including Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson and Milton. The book provides innovative ways of reading linguistic and poetic style, and assessing early modern attitudes towards the past.Ranging from the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson and Milton to those of Robert Southwell and Anna Trapnel, this groundbreaking study explores the conscious use of archaic style by the poets and dramatists between 1590 and 1674. It focuses on the wide-ranging, complex and self-conscious uses of archaic linguistic and poetic style, analysing the uses to which writers put literary style in order to re-embody and reshape the past. Munro brings together scholarly conversations on temporality, memory and historiography, on the relationships between medieval and early modern literary cultures, on the workings of dramatic and poetic style, and on national history and identity. Neither pure anachronism nor pure nostalgia, the attempts of writers to reconstruct outmoded styles within their own works reveal a largely untold story about the workings of literary influence and tradition, the interactions between past and present, and the uncertain contours of English nationhood.
'Munro's method of defining and illuminating many facets of poetic archaism and their relation to cultural change through concatenated close readings makes for an enjoyably well-paced argument and an exciting sense of generative theory emerging from the verbal weave of the texts. … the conceptual apparatus and exemplary analyses that fill its pages will invite reconsideration of archaism as a lifelong Miltonic interest and strategy.' David Currell, Milton Quarterly
ISBN: 9781107649842
Dimensions: 230mm x 154mm x 18mm
Weight: 490g
322 pages