Catherine Bates

Professor of English Catherine Bates

Bates Catherine

The Rhetoric of Courtship is about the literature of the Elizabethan period with a particular focus on the literature of the court. This book considers how writers and courtiers related to Elizabeth I within a system of patronage and how they portrayed this relationship in fictional courtship of poetry and prose.

The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature

Sidney's Defence of Poesy is generally taken to present a model of poetry as ideal: the poet depicts ideals of human conduct which readers are inspired to imitate. Catherine Bates challenges this view, and shows how idealist poetics is complicit with the money form and its related ills: commodification, fetishism, and the abuse of power.

Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney's Defence of Poesy

On Not Defending Poetry

Patrick Cheney

The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesises existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the volumes. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry features a history of the birth moment of modern 'English' poetry in greater detail than previous studies. It examines the literary transitions, institutional contexts, artistic practices, and literary genres within which poets compose their works. Each chapter combines an orientation to its topic and a contribution to the field. Specifically, the volume introduces a narrative about the advent of modern English poetry from Skelton to Spenser, attending to the events that underwrite the poets' achievements: Humanism; Reformation; monarchism and republicanism; colonization; print and manuscript; theatre; science; and companionate marriage. Featured are metre and form, figuration and allusiveness, and literary career, as well as a wide range of poets, from Wyatt, Surrey, and Isabella Whitney to Ralegh, Drayton, and Mary Herbert. Major works discussed include Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and Shakespeare's Sonnets.

Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry

The Oxford History of Poetry in English

Abigail Matthewman

Clearly illustrated with examples of written work and useful interactive exercises, this guide will encourage independent learning, helping arts and humanities students to develop effective study habits and learn successful strategies for reading and writing about theoretical texts.

Studying Arts and Humanities

Every great civilisation from the Bronze Age to the present day has produced epic poems. Epic poetry has always had a profound influence on other literary genres, including its own parody in the form of mock-epic. This Companion surveys over four thousand years of epic poetry from the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh to Derek Walcott's postcolonial Omeros. The list of epic poets analysed here includes some of the greatest writers in literary history in Europe and beyond: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Camões, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats and Pound, among others. Each essay, by an expert in the field, pays close attention to the way these writers have intimately influenced one another to form a distinctive and cross-cultural literary tradition. Unique in its coverage of the vast scope of that tradition, this book is an essential companion for students of literature of all kinds and in all ages.

The Cambridge Companion to the Epic

Abi Matthewman

The most comprehensive collection of essays on Renaissance poetry on the market Covering the period 1520–1680, A Companion to Renaissance Poetry offers 46 essays which present an in-depth account of the context, production, and interpretation of early modern British poetry. It provides students with a deep appreciation for, and sensitivity toward, the ways in which poets of the period understood and fashioned a distinctly vernacular voice, while engaging them with some of the debates and departures that are currently animating the discipline. A Companion to Renaissance Poetry analyzes the historical, cultural, political, and religious background of the time, addressing issues such as education, translation, the Reformation, theorizations of poetry, and more. The book immerses readers in non-dramatic poetry from Wyatt to Milton, focusing on the key poetic genres–epic, lyric, complaint, elegy, epistle, pastoral, satire, and religious poetry. It also offers an inclusive account of the poetic production of the period by canonical and less canonical writers, female and male. Finally, it offers examples of current developments in the interpretation of Renaissance poetry, including economic, ecological, scientific, materialist, and formalist approaches. Covers a wide selection of authors and texts Features contributions from notable authors, scholars, and critics across the globe Offers a substantial section on recent and developing approaches to reading Renaissance poetry A Companion to Renaissance Poetry is an ideal resource for all students and scholars of the literature and culture of the Renaissance period.

A Companion to Renaissance Poetry

This text challenges the long tradition which sees human play as the fount of creativity and origin of all civilization. The book traces the history of an alternative theory of play in Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Freud, where play is an end in itself - a cultivation of aesthetic forms which do nothing to disguise their artificiality and which are loved only for the fictions which they are. Nietzsche, the arch-philosopher of play, Freud, the theorizer of slips and jokes, and Shakespeare, master of the man-made illusions of the play world, are shown to anticipate the playful philosophy which has become a hallmark of postmodern times.

The Theory and Practice of Play in Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Freud

Play in a Godless World

As an age-old metaphor for the sexual chase, the hunt provides a uniquely conflicted site for the representation of masculinity. On the one hand, hunting had from ancient times served to define a particular and culturally approved mode of masculinity as heroic, pursuant, and goal-oriented, where success was measured by the achievement of the objectives set: the capture and killing of prey. When applied to love, on the other hand, hunting was inflected quite differently. At first glance, the basic scenario of a male subject pursuing elusive quarry over which he ultimately comes to assert control might seem to epitomise the dynamic of the sexual chase, yet when poets invoke the hunt in an amorous context, this most obvious manifestation of the metaphor is not the one they put to use. On the contrary, in lyric poetry and romance, the hunt metaphor serves to demote or destabilise the masculine subject in some way. The huntsman is routinely a figure of failure: for all his efforts, he either fails to catch what he pursues, catches the wrong thing, ends up being caught by others, or runs round in circles chasing himself. His failure is measured precisely as a shortfall from the cultural ideal. The metaphor of the hunt thus opens up possibilities for exploring definitions of masculinity that deviate from culturally approved models of mastery and power. It shows how limited those models are and offers examples of alternative and counter-cultural versions of a masculine subjectivity that radically query patriarchal stereotypes of gender and class. The hunt has been the subject of increased critical interest over last few years, partly as a result of its politicisation as an issue, as reflected in recent changes to hunting legislation within the UK. Shifting attitudes to the hunt indicate that as a cultural phenomenon it continues to mobilise strong opinion and to activate notions of class and gender identity to this day. Masculinity and the Hunt is a unique study considering the link between hunting and masculinity in the literature of the sixteenth century.

Wyatt to Spenser

Masculinity and the Hunt

'Masculinity and the Hunt' traces the imagery of the hunt in English literature of the 16th century, exploring a set of practices and motifs that are central to the culture of the period.

Catherine Bates

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