Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance
Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance
Publication supported by the Bevington Fund
We take it for granted today that the study of poetry belongs in school—but in sixteenth-century England, making Ovid or Virgil into pillars of the curriculum was a revolution. Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance explores how poets reacted to the new authority of humanist pedagogy, and how they transformed a genre to express their most radical doubts.
Jeff Dolven investigates what it meant for a book to teach as he traces the rivalry between poet and schoolmaster in the works of John Lyly, Philip Sydney, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton. Drawing deeply on the era’s pedagogical literature, Dolven explores the links between humanist strategies of instruction and romance narrative, rethinking such concepts as experience, sententiousness, example, method, punishment, lessons, and endings. In scrutinizing this pivotal moment in the ancient, intimate contest between art and education, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance offers a new view of one of the most unconsidered—yet fundamental—problems in literary criticism: poetry’s power to please and instruct.
288 pages | 2 halftones, 13 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2007
Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature, General Criticism and Critical Theory
Reviews
Table of Contents
ONE Telling Learning
TWO Experience: Lyly’s Euphues
THREE Maxim: The Old Arcadia
FOUR Example: The 1590 Faerie Queene
FIVE Method: The New Arcadia
SIX Punishment: The 1596 Faerie Queene
Coda: The Sense of a Lesson
Acknowledgements
Index
Awards
International Spenser Society: MacCaffrey Award
Won
Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies: Warren-Brooks Award
Won
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