The English Renaissance has been the focus of intense interpretive activity. It has been a scene of trial for the critical methodologies of deconstruction, feminism, new historicism, psychoanalytic poststructuralism, and cultural studies. Trials of Authorship extends and challenges this theoretically informed criticism. Jonathan Crewe argues that the commitment to innovation, transgression, and radical change has increasingly obscured some powerfully resistant elements both in Renaissance culture and in these critical discourses themselves. He calls for a recognition of defensive, perverse, and self-limiting trends in Renaissance writing, and also of the conservative investment by critics in the Renaissance as a cultural epoch. Crewe focuses on the relatively stable poetic and cultural forms operative in the Renaissance. He argues that these established forms, which shape poetic composition, social interaction, and individual identity, are subject to only limited reconstruction by English authors in the sixteenth century. They facilitate and limit literary and social expression and result in more sharply conflicted literary production than current critics have been willing to acknowledge. Moreover, Crewe argues that while this literary production is dominantly masculinist, it nevertheless reveals the stresses of negotiating complex structures of class and gender, history and culture. The literary results are accordingly varied and do not lend themselves to uniform interpretation. Trials of Authorship presents a consecutive reading of English Renaissance authors from Wyatt to Shakespeare and redraws the existing picture of the English Renaissance in the sixteenth century. It does so by concentrating on authors whose canonical status is somewhat precarious, namely the poets Wyatt, Surrey, and Gascoigne, and the "non-literary" authors of two Tudor prose biographies. The book makes a case for the continuing significance of all the texts in question, while its emphasis on them also constitutes an intentional shift away from the Elizabethan period towards that of Henry VIII. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.
Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.
Jonathan Crewe is the Leon D. Black Professor Emeritus of Shakespearean Studies at Dartmouth College.
“This is a brilliant and challenging book, explicitly calling into question the desire to rewrite the Renaissance and historicize it anew. In bracing readings of what is characterized as the phallomorphism of sixteenth-century verse and prose—a destabilization that we ignore at our peril—Crewe argues for a formal and material recalcitrance that inescapably haunts sixteenth-century texts and authors and posthumous accounts of their fashioning. No reader of this book (of whatever critical disposition) will be able to ignore its claims—or to accept them easily, for to do so means nothing less than suspending (critical) business-as-usual. Crewe’s is not an ‘other’ sixteenth century or a ‘new’ one; it is, rather, one critics have, unknowingly, been (de)authorized by all the while.”—Jonathan Goldberg, author of Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts
“One of our most adventurous students of intertextuality, Jonathan Crewe has turned his attention to a collection of Tudor writings that normally receive perfunctory critical treatment. His remarks are as shrewd and unpredictable as we might expect from his earlier books, and they continue his elaboration of a story of Renaissance ‘authorship’ in the radical sense of that term, as an augmentation and a response to what has gone before. These are exciting and liberating essays that suggest a new way of seeing a literary history of sixteenth-century English literature.”—Donald Cheney, coeditor of The Spenser Encyclopedia
206 pp.5.5 x 8.5
9780520303287$39.95|£34.00Paper
Sep 2018