A Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500-1700 (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture)

An innovative collection of original essays providing an expansive picture of globalization across the early modern world, now in its second edition

A Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500–1700, Second Edition provides readers with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of both macro and micro perspectives on the commercial and cross-cultural interactions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Covering a uniquely broad range of literary and cultural materials, historical contexts, and geographical regions, the Companion’s varied chapters offer interdisciplinary perspectives on the implications of early modern concepts of commerce, material and artistic culture, sexual and cross-racial encounters, conquest and enslavement, social, artistic, and religious cross-pollinations, geographical “discoveries,” and more.

Building upon the success of its predecessor, this second edition of A Companion to the Global Renaissance radically extends its scope by moving beyond England and English culture. Newly-commissioned essays investigate intercultural and intra-cultural exchanges, transactions, and encounters involving England, European powers, Eastern kingdoms, Africa, Islamic empires, and the Americas, within cross-disciplinary frameworks. Offering a complex and multifaceted view of early modern globalization, this new edition:

• Demonstrates the continuing global “turn” in Early Modern Studies through original essays exploring interconnected exchanges, transactions, and encounters
• Provides significantly expanded coverage of global interactions involving England, European powers such as Portugal, Spain, and The Netherlands, Eastern empires such as Japan, and the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires
• Includes a Preface and Afterword, as well as a revised and expanded Introduction summarizing the evolving field of Global Early Modern Studies and describing the motifs and methodologies informing the essays within the volume
• Explores an array of new subjects, including an exceptional woman traveler in Eurasia, the Jesuit presence in Mughal India and sixteenth-century Japan, the influence of Mughal art on an Amsterdam painter-cum-poet, the cultural impact of Eastern trade on plays and entertainments in early modern London, Safavid cultural disseminations, English and Portuguese slaving practices, the global contexts of English pattern poetry, and global lyric transmissions across cultures

A wide-ranging account of the global expansions and interactions of the period, A Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500–1700, Second Edition remains essential reading for early modern scholars and students ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to more advanced scholars and specialists in the field.

Jyotsna G. Singh is a Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University. She is the author or editor of numerous books including Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism; Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period (co-ed. Ivo Kamps); Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory, A Companion to the Global Renaissance, and the book series New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800. Professor Singh has received visiting fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Queen Mary University of London, the John Carter Brown Library, and was most recently elected a Visiting Fellow at St Catherine’s College, Oxford University, UK, 2019.