Authorial Personality and the Making of Renaissance Texts - The Force of Character

Studying texts by Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus, Saint Jerome, George Gascoigne, and Fulke Greville, this volume explores authorial character as an instrument of textual analysis in the scholarship of early Renaissance literature.

List of contents

• Introduction: Style and the Man


• 1: How to Judge a Book by its Author


• 2: The Peopling of Valla's De falso (1440): Character Fiction at the Origin of Modern Philology


• 3: Erasmus's Vita Hieronymi (1516): Taking Editorial Work Personally


• 4: Gascoigne's Wandering 'I' in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) and The Posies (1575)


• 5: Fulke Greville Speaks to the Dead in A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney (1614)


• Epilogue: Biographism as Close Reading in Shakespeare's Sonnet 76 (1609) and Machiavelli's 'Letter to Vettori' (1513)

About the author

Douglas S. Pfeiffer is Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University. He received his PhD from Columbia University's English and Comparative Literature Department and has taught at Columbia, Barnard College, The Cooper Union, and The University of California, Irvine. His research centers on Renaissance humanism, history of the book, and early modern poetry.

Summary

Studying texts by Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus, Saint Jerome, George Gascoigne, and Fulke Greville, this volume explores authorial character as an instrument of textual analysis in the scholarship of early Renaissance literature.

Product details

• Authors: Douglas S. Pfeiffer, Douglas S. (Associate Professor of Engli Pfeiffer
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 24.02.2022
• EAN: 9780198714163
• ISBN: 978-0-19-871416-3
• No. of pages: 486
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; English, LITERARY CRITICISM / Renaissance, c 1000 CE to c 1500, Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, c 1400 to c 1499 (period of the Italian Renaissance), Literary studies: c 1400 to c 1600