Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature

Andrew Hiscock is Professor of English at Bangor University, Wales. He teaches and publishes widely on early modern literature in British and European contexts. His earlier monographs include Authority and Desire: Crises of Interpretation in Shakespeare and Racine (1996) and The Uses of this World: Thinking Space in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cary and Jonson (2004). He edited the 2008 Yearbook of English Studies devoted to Tudor literature and his edited critical collection Middleton: Women Beware Women appeared in 2011. He is co-editor of the academic journal English and is about to take up his role as editor (English Literature) of the Modern Language Review and as series editor for the Yearbook of English Studies.

'Hiscock offers a fascinating account of the nature and uses of individual and cultural memory in the early modern period … he elegantly demonstrates … that remembering, committing to memory and memorialising were notions - and actions - at the very heart of identity formation through the course of the long sixteenth century.' Greg Walker, University of Edinburgh

• Introduction: 'the dark backward and abyss of time'; 1. 'To seke the place where I my self hadd lost': acts of memory in the poetry of Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey; 2. 'Remembre not (lorde) myne offences': Katherine Parr and the politics of recollection; 3. 'Better a few things well pondered, than to trouble the memory with too much': troubling memory and martyr in Foxe's Acts and Monuments; 4. Text, recollection and Elizabethan fiction: Gascoigne, Nashe, Deloney; 5. The doleful Clorinda? Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and the vocation of memory; 6. 'Tell me, where all past yeares are': John Donne and the obligations of memory; 7. 'Of all the powers of the mind [...] the most delicate and fraile': the poetry of Ben Jonson and the renewal of memory; 8. 'This art of memory': Francis Bacon, memory and the discourses of power.