Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance - Hardcover

Norbrook, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0710097786 ISBN 13: 9780710097781

Publisher: Routledge, 1984

Synopsis

Renaissance English poetry was closely involved with affairs of state: some poets held high office, others wrote to influence those in power and to sway an increasingly independent public opinion. In this revised edition of his groundbreaking study, David Norbrook offers a clear account of the issues that engaged the passions of such leading figures as Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, and John Milton, and provides introductions to a host of neglected writers.

About this title

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)

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)

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)

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)

About the Author

David Norbrook is Merton Professor of English, University of Oxford.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1984
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0710097786
• ISBN 13: 9780710097781
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280