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This is a comprehensive collection of essays on the life, work, and times of the Elizabethan writer and courtier, Philip Sidney (1554-1586), one of the most important figures of the English Renaissance.
List of contents
- 1: CATHERINE BATES: Introduction
- PART I. CONTEXTS
- 2: MICHAEL G. BRENNAN: Sidney's Life
- 3: KEVIN PASK: The Sidney Legend
- 4: MARY ELLEN LAMB: Sidney and his Family
- 5: WENDY OLMSTED: Sidney and his Friends
- 6: LISA CELOVSKY: Sidney and the Court
- 7: RICHARD A. McCABE: Sidney and Patronage
- PART II. WORKS
- 8: TIMOTHY D. CROWLEY: The Lady of May and The Four Foster Children of Desire
- 9: PATRICK CHENEY: Two Pastoralls
- 10: PAUL A. MARQUIS: Certain Sonnets
- 11: CATHERINE BATES: Astrophil and Stella
- 12: VLADIMIR BRLJAK: The Defence of Poesy
- 13: ALEX DAVIS: The Old Arcadia
- 14: NANDINI DAS: The New Arcadia
- 15: KIMBERLY JOHNSON: Psalms
- 16: ANDREW GORDON: Letters
- PART III. LITERARY CONTEXTS
- 17: SARAH KNIGHT: Education and Pedagogy
- 18: PATRICK CHENEY: Authorship and Literary Career
- 19: JOSHUA ECKHARDT: Manuscript Circulation
- 20: JOEL B. DAVIS: Early Publication
- PART IV. SIDNEY'S FORMS AND GENRES
- 21: WILLIAM J. KENNEDY: Sonnet
- 22: GAVIN ALEXANDER: Lyric
- 23: KENNETH BORRIS: Pastoral
- 24: TIFFANY JO WERTH: Romance
- 25: COREY McELENEY: Fiction
- 26: CATHERINE BATES: Drama
- PART V. SIDNEY'S POETIC CRAFT
- 27: ROBERT STAGG: Prosody
- 28: GAVIN ALEXANDER: Song
- 29: JONATHAN P. LAMB: Sentence
- 30: COLLEEN RUTH ROSENFELD: Style
- PART VI. SIDNEY AND HIS TIMES
- 31: BRIAN C. LOCKEY: Sidney and Religion
- 32: MICHAEL MACK: Sidney and Philosophy
- 33: ZENÓN LUIS-MARTÍNEZ: Sidney and Logic
- 34: JENNY C. MANN: Sidney and Rhetoric
- 35: TIMOTHY D. CROWLEY: Sidney and Politics
- 36: ROBERT E. STILLMAN: Sidney and Europe
- 37: ANDREW HADFIELD: Sidney and the Colonies
- 38: CHRIS BARRETT: Sidney and Maps
- 39: DAVID LANDRETH: Sidney and Money
- 40: ADAM McKEOWN: Sidney and Class
- 41: STEPHEN GUY-BRAY: Sidney and Gender
- 42: FREYA SIERHUIS: Sidney and the Passions
- 43: KAREN RABER: Sidney and Animals
- 44: CHRIS STAMATAKIS: Sidney and Visual Culture
- 45: MATTHEW ZARNOWIECKI: Sidney and Music
- 46: JAMES M. BROMLEY: Sidney and Clothes
- 47: ANNE M. MYERS: Sidney and Architecture
- 48: REBECCA BUSHNELL: Sidney and Gardens
- PART VII. RECEPTION
- 49: SAMUEL FALLON: Reading Sidney
- 50: NATASHA SIMONOVA: Writing Sidney
About the author
Catherine Bates studied English at Oxford, was Andrew Bradley-James Maxwell Junior Research Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, and Fellow of English at Peterhouse, Cambridge, before moving to the University of Warwick, where she was Head of English and is now Research Professor in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. She has held a Solmsen Research Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Mellon Fellowship at the Huntington Library, California, as well as Visiting Research Fellowships in Toronto, Cambridge, and London. She is an Elected Fellow of the English Association.
Summary
The Oxford Handbook of Philip Sidney is the most comprehensive collection of essays on Sidney published to date. Written by an expert team of international specialists, its fifty chapters cover every aspect of Sidney's life, works, and the times in which he lived. It provides fresh interpretations of Sidney's career, texts, and legacy, drawing on the most recent historical and archival research and showcasing the range of critical approaches-historicist, formalist, postcolonial, post-humanist, presentist, materialist, economic, ecological, affective, queer, and zoocritical-which has opened up so many new perspectives in the study of Renaissance literature in recent years.
Part I, 'Contexts', re-examines Sidney's life, family relations and friendship groups, his roles as courtier and patron, and the 'Sidney legend' which largely shaped these narratives round the political agendas of his day. Part II, 'Works', offers new, in-depth readings of Sidney's writings, including his poetry, prose, letters, and psalms. Part III, 'Literary Contexts', explores the pedagogic and practical contexts within which these writings were produced, including Sidney's own education, the humanist emphasis that literature teach and delight, newly evolving ideas of authorship, and the potentials presented by the circulation of his works in manuscript and print. Part IV, 'Sidney's Forms and Genres', drills down further into his literary texts, showing how they both drew from and contributed to new developments in the writing of sonnets, lyric, pastoral, romance, fiction, and drama within the larger sphere of the European literary Renaissance. Part V, 'Sidney's Poetic Craft', illuminates Sidney's distinctive skills as a poetic maker, revealing his attention to detail by providing minute analyses of his prosody, his interest in song, his sentence structure, and his unique conception of style. Part VI, 'Sidney and His Times', embeds Sidney within his period, providing individual chapters on his active engagement with its religion, philosophy, logic, rhetoric, politics, with Europe, the colonies, maps, money, class, gender, the passions, animals, visual culture, music, clothes, architecture, and gardens. Finally, Part VII, 'Reception', investigates Sidney's enduring legacy as his works continued to be read and re-written by later generations, shaping the course of the English literary tradition to come.
