Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590–1674

With this study we hope to serve the needs of those students and teachers who feel particularly committed to the changes that have characterized our field in recent years. The renewed emphasis on historicism and the decline of formalist aestheticism in medieval studies have rendered it desirable to have a literary history that attends more singularly to the material and social contexts and uses of Old English texts. Although the need is greater than this volume can really satisfy, we hope that the present study will nonetheless prove useful to those who, like us, see literature’s relation to history and culture as our field’s area of chief pedagogical interest, and the respect in which it has most to offer literary studies at large.

(Call for Papers) Historical literature – here framed as material composed before the twentieth century – represents a budding area of focus within current stylistics research. Building on long traditions established in literary criticism and historical pragmatics, this increasing engagement with historical style is observable in recent publications, collaborative research projects, and special events (such as the ‘In honour of Sylvia Adamson’ symposium at the University of Sheffield this past September). These efforts have produced dynamic and interdisciplinary research clusters oriented around prominent historical literary periods including Victorian and even Shakespearean literature. This symposium seeks to embrace this interest by providing a platform from which to explore the application (and adaptation) of stylistic tools and approaches to Old, Middle, and Early Modern English texts. Our focus on early English literatures underscores our wish to facilitate the more widespread analysis of medieval texts, as well as to further engage with the rapidly growing corpus of scholarship evidenced in the language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. To this end, the symposium ultimately aims to promote the consideration of earlier historical material than generally addressed in conventional stylistic inquiry. This event also offers an opportunity for critical evaluation of these practices, promoting discussion of how to best integrate modern stylistic approaches with the textual requirements of (and features unique to) early literary genres. This has potential not only to significantly enhance our understanding of the literature being analysed (and the cultures that produced that literature), but also to help us refine our methods and ultimately broaden the scope of their utility. The symposium encourages more widespread consideration of these historical texts by exploring questions such as: • How does the temporal distance between discourse world and present-day audiences affect stylistic appreciation of these early texts? • How might these interpretative challenges be addressed with present tools and methods? • What changes can be made to our current stylistic methods to complement the unique character of these historical materials? • How does the stylistic analysis of early texts enhance our understanding of those texts, the cultures that produced them, and the diachronic development of human cognition? We invite abstracts for 15-minute presentations discussing any aspect of literary linguistics as applied to texts composed in Old, Middle, or Early Modern English. Submissions are welcome featuring methods and topics including, but not limited to: • Synchronic or diachronic approaches • Quantitative or qualitative analysis • Historical discourse analysis • Intertextuality • Narratology • Cognitive poetics • Corpus linguistics/stylistics • Non-digital topics and approaches (i.e. manuscripts) • Stylistics and translation • Characterization • Speech and thought presentation • Metaphor • Metre • Any other topic with stylistic impact and significance to the field

Introduction only; the book is available from Yale University Press.

Uncorrected proof

James Simpson's Reform and Cultural Revolution, the second volume of the new Oxford English Literary History, is an imaginative tour de force.  It is both stunning in its intellectual breadth and critical honesty and astonishing in its eccentric approach to writing a literary history. Who would imagine a literary history of the period - beginning with a chapter on John Leland (ca. -)? And if the table of contents were to list only one poet in its chapter headings, would anyone have put money on that being John Lydgate rather than Geoff rey Chaucer? It is, furthermore, unusual to begin most chapters covering these two centuries with Tudor writers or vignettes rather than with earlier Middle English texts or at least Ricardian authors.  It is surprising that the editors of the Oxford series allowed such a counterintuitive approach, but the result is very impressive indeed. This is not a traditional history, but a major work of interpretive scholarship that makes a signifi cant contribution to our understanding of English literature, tracing continuity as well as change by analyzing large cultural and political patterns as a whole during a time traditionally partitioned into two as comprising the end of one period of literary history and the beginning of another.

Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 2019

This essay considers the contrast between plainness and eloquence in some canonical English (secular) lyrics and plays from Wyatt through Shakespeare. Its claim is that in the relevant body of work, and in the culture as a whole, each of the styles bore a specifiable ideological charge. It shows that English secular poetry and drama in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century was profoundly aware of the ideologies associated with the two levels or kinds of style, and profoundly divided in its commitments. In lyric poetry, this is true in Wyatt at the beginning of the sixteenth century and of Sidney at the end. In drama, Shakespeare is profoundly aware both of the styles and of the ideologies with which they are associated. He uses and also critiques both of these in the poems and the plays. Othello is the culmination of both the use and the critique.

Renaissance Quarterly, 2010

2004