Poetic Theory and Practice in Early Modern Verse

Zenón Luis-Martínez is Senior Lecturer of English at the University of Huelva (Spain), where he teaches medieval and early modern literature. He has edited Abraham Fraunce’s The Shepherds’ Logic and Other Dialectical Writings (2016) for the MHRA Critical Texts Series. He is the author of In Words and Deeds: The Spectacle of Incest in English Renaissance Tragedy (Rodopi, 2002). His articles on English Renaissance and Restoration literature have appeared in journals like ELH, Cahiers Élisabéthains, Parergon and English Studies. He has also coedited several collections, among them, with Luis Gómez Canseco, Between Shakespeare and Cervantes: Trails along the Renaissance (Newark, NJ: Juan de la Cuesta, 2006), and, with Sonia Hernández-Santano, the special issue Poetry, the Arts of Discourse and the Discourse of the Arts: Rethinking Renaissance Poetic Theory and Practice for Parergon (Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies). His current research includes a critical edition of Chapman’s The Shadow of Night and Ovid’s Banquet of Sense for the MHRA and a monograph on Chapman’s poetics. He leads the Research Project “Towards a New Aesthetics of Elizabethan Poetry” (MINECO FFI2017-82269-P). Since May 2018 he is President of SEDERI (Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies).

While sixteenth-century England witnessed an explosion of works on poetics, some of the period’s most important and lasting ideas about literature emerge from poetry itself. As this collection reveals, practice not only leads theory but ‘unwrites’ it to unveil a living, pulsing art in which form outstrips all formulations.

• AcknowledgementsNotes on ContributorsIntroduction: Unwritten Arts – Zenón Luis-MartínezI. Origin: Poetic Aetiologies1: Justified by Whose Grace? Poetic Worth and Transcendent Doubt in Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Poetry – Joan Curbet Soler2: The Logical Cause of an Early Modern Poetics of Action – Emma Annette Wilson3: Atomies of Love: Material (Mis)interpretations of Cupid’s Origin in Elizabethan Poetry – Cassandra GormanII. Style: Outgrowing the Arts4: Bloody Poetics: Towards a Physiology of the Epic Poem – Rocío G. Sumillera5: Figuring Ineloquence in Sixteenth-Century Poetry – David J. Amelang6: Eloquent Bodies: Rhetoricising the Symptoms of Love in the English Epyllion – Sonia Hernández-SantanoIII. Poesis: Art’s Prisoners7: Philip Sidney’s Sublime Self-authorship: Authenticity, Ecstasy and Energy in the Defence of Poesy and Astrophil and Stella – Jonathan P. A. Sell8: From Favour to Eternal Life: Trajectories of Grace and the Poetic Career in the Sonnets of Henry Constable and Barnabe Barnes – María Jesús Pérez-Jaúregui9: Thomas Lodge’s ‘Supple Muse’: Imitation, Inspiration and Imagination in Phillis – Cinta Zunino-Garrido10: The Worthy Knots of Fulke Greville – Sarah Knight 11: George Chapman’s ‘Habit of Poesie’ – Zenón Luis-MartínezAfterword – Clark Hulse