Renaissance Poetry

This is the first single volume to collate essays about sixteenth and seventeenth century poetry, and explore the changes that have occurred in the interpretation of English Renaissance poetry in the last twenty years. Assuming no previous knowledge of Renaissance poetry, the collection represents many critical methodologies, including new historicism, cultural materialism, feminism, and an historically informed psychoanalytic criticism. It shows how recent critical approaches have transformed traditional accounts of literary history by analysing the role of poetry in nationalism, the changing associations of poetry and class-status, and the rediscovered writings of women