Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century

Here is a historian scrutinizing literature, drawing out linguistic transformations and distortions and explicating them via politics. It is a remarkable achievement, offering many excellent analyses of which perhaps the most compelling is Montaigne's retelling of the first encounter of Spaniards and Americans.... This quality of reading and writing is found everywhere in Hampton's book. -- Margaret M. McGowan * Times Literary Supplement * Through avid research, close reading and fine writing he gives us a wonderful book on the emergence of French nationhood in The Renaissance: Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France.... For once modern concerns about politics and empire, etc., do not produce anachronistic or skewed readings of the past but underline continuities and comparisons. There is also in this complex but readable text an excellent discussion of that old standby of authors and critics, the difference between appearance and reality. * Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance * Displaying exceptional clarity and originality, Timothy Hampton's book is a superb addition not only to the expanding field of nation-building in early modern Europe, but also the fields of ethics and literature concerned with the question of alterity. -- Zahi Zalloua, Princeton University * French Review * Hampton's new book unearths a whole series of complicated problems that lie buried in what are admittedly much studied, if non canonical literary texts of the French Renaissance.... This is a very interesting study that should appeal broadly to specialists in any number of fields. -- Michael Wolf, Pennsylvania State University * Sixteenth Century Journal *

Timothy Hampton is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (also from Cornell), which won the Roland A. Bainton Book Prize from the Sixteenth Century Studies Society.