Ovid and masculinity in English Renaissance literature
By: edited by John S. Garrison and Goran Stanivukovic
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2020
Place of publication: Montreal; Kingston; London; Chicago
Language: eng
Number of pages: 315
ISBN-13: 9780228004530; 9780228004547
Subjects: Influence; English literature; History and criticism; Masculinity in literature; Masculinité dans la littérature; Early modern; Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)
Description: "Ovid transformed English Renaissance literary ideas about love, erotic desire, embodiment, and gender more than any other classical poet. Ovidian concepts of femininity have been well served by modern criticism, but Ovid's impact on masculinity in Renaissance literature remains underexamined. This volume explores how English Renaissance writers shifted away from Virgilian heroic figures to embrace romantic ideals of courtship, civility, and friendship. Ovid's writing about masculinity, love, and desire shaped discourses of masculinity across a wide range of literary texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including poetry, prose fiction, and drama. The book covers all major works by Ovid, in addition to Italian humanists Angelo Poliziano and Natale Conti, canonical writers such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and John Milton, and lesser-known writers such as Wynkyn de Worde, Michael Drayton, Thomas Lodge, Richard Johnson, Robert Greene, John Marston, Thomas Heywood, and Francis Beaumont. Individual essays examine emasculation, abjection, pacifism, female masculinity, boys' masculinity, parody, hospitality, and protean Jewish masculinity. Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature demonstrates how Ovid's poetry gave vigour and vitality to male voices in English literature--how his works inspired English writers to reimagine the male authorial voice, the male body, desire, and love in fresh terms."--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Ovid's Orpheus and the Soft Masculinity of English Poetics / Jenny C. Mann; title: Abject Authorship: A Portrait of the Artist in Ovid and his Renaissance Imitators / Catherine Bates; title: Ovid in Love and War: Pacifist Masculinity in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis / John S. Garrison; title: The Faerie Queene's Muses: Hermaphroditus, Masculine Education, and Ovidian Inspiration / Kyle Pivetti; title: The Birth of Tragedy: Milton, Ovidian Masculinity, and Poliziano's Orfeo / Ian Frederick Moulton; title: Ovid and Unheroic Masculinity in the Prose Romance of the English Renaissance / Goran Stanivukovic; title: After Ovid's Sappho: Muteness Envy, Female Masculinity, and the Ethics of Mutability / Melissa E. Sanchez; title: "Of Youth and Age": Ovid and Generational Masculinities in Ben Jonson's Poetaster (1602) / Liz Oakley-Brown; title: Making a Politic Gentleman: The First Ars amatoriain English / M.L. Stapleton; title: Boys to Men: Fashioning Masculinity and the Ovidian Epyllia / Sarah Carter; title: The Uncooked Goose: Ovid's Philemon, Milton's Adam, and the Transformation of Hospitable Manliness / Eric B. Song; title: Ovid's Proteus and the Figure of the Male Jew in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta / Lisa S. Starks.