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Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England

Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England

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This volume explores the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England as a whole and seeks to explain the relationship between the Reformation and the literary renaissance of the Elizabethan period. Its central theme is the 'common' in its double sense of something shared and something base, and it argues that making common the work of God is at the heart of the English Reformation just as making common the literature of antiquity and of early modern Europe is at the heart of the English Renaissance. Its central question is 'why was the Renaissance in England so late?' That question is addressed in terms of the relationship between Humanism and Protestantism and the tensions between democracy and the imagination which persist throughout the century.

Part One establishes a social dimension for literary culture in the period by exploring the associations of 'commonwealth' and related terms. It addresses the role of Greek in the period before and during the Reformation in disturbing the old binary of elite Latin and common English. It also argues that the Reformation principle of making common is coupled with a hostility towards fiction, which has the effect of closing down the humanist renaissance of the earlier decades. Part Two presents translation as the link between Reformation and Renaissance, and the final part discusses the Elizabethan literary renaissance and deals in turn with poetry, short prose fiction, and the drama written for the common stage.

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BrandOxford University Press, USA
Pub dateJul 27, 2021
ISBN-100192844814
ISBN-139780192844811
Pages368
LanguageEnglish
Last updated 2025-08-07 02:07
$46.38
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This is the first newly prepared, complete edition of Henry Vaughan's poetry and prose for over a century. In the introduction, the reader will find an up-to-date biography of Vaughan, a substantial history of developments in Vaughan scholarship and criticism from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, and full bibliographical descriptions of each of the volumes published in the author's lifetime. The texts carefully reproduce original spelling and punctuation, with textual variants and significant editorial emendations made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries noted at the foot of the page for easy reference. Vaughan's volumes are printed in the order of their first publication and each is introduced by a brief essay on the date and circumstances of its publication, its historical and literary contexts, and the nature of its contents. Vaughan's surviving letters are also included, and appendices print additional poems found in other volumes, poems of dubious ascription, and marginalia made in medical books owned by Vaughan. The third volume contains the commentary on prose works and poems. The notes on the poetry take into consideration material derived from scholarly and critical work published over the past forty years, and the edition locates Vaughan's translations and original prose texts firmly, and for the first time, in the complex religious, political, and intellectual contexts of the mid-seventeenth century. The third volume also contains a substantial bibliography and an index.
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