Title: Tradition and subversion in Renaissance literature
First published: 2007
Description: "Deconstructionist critics have argued that literary works contain conflicting or contradictory meanings, thus creating an aporia, or impasse, that prevents readers from interpreting the work. Here, however, Murray Roston offers detailed and essentially new analyses of works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and Donne, arguing that the seemingly contradictory presence of traditional and subversive elements in their major works actually creates the source of much of their literary achievement." "Chapters explore The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, The Faerie Queene, Volpone, and the Meditations of John Donne, highlighting the creative tension between centripetal and centrifugal factors (borrowing Bakhtin's terms). As Roston demonstrates, this tension exists in a variety of genres, including poetry, epic and drama, and even in religious prose - which, he acknowledges, might be thought to be exempt from such inner conflict because of its doctrinal and theological focus."--BOOK JACKET
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation, Renaissance, Intertextuality, English literature, History and criticism, Ambiguity in literature
Places: England
People: Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599), John Donne (1572-1631), William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Ben Jonson (1573?-1637)
Time periods: Early modern, 1500-1700
LC classification: PR421 .R67 2007