Reading the Renaissance: Culture, Poetics, and Drama

Approaching the Renaissance from many perspectives-historicism, genre studies, close reading, anthropology, feminism, new historicism, cultural materialism and postmodernism-these original essays explore the boundaries between genre and gender, languages and literatures, reading and criticism, the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, the early modern and the post-modern, world and theater. They offer a new way of looking at the Renaissance and at literature and history generally-through the lens of cultural pluralism, which reflects the changing nature of Western society. The collection reveals that the study of literature should take into account its cultural context and that it is enriched by an examination of other literatures.

Jonathan Hart has been a Visiting Fellow or Visiting Scholar at Toronto, Harvard, and Cambridge. His books include Theater and World: The Problematics of Shakespeare’s History (1992), Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination (1994), and (edited with Richard Bauman) Explorations in Difference: Law, Culture and Politics (1995).