For more than a decade, the English Renaissance has been   the scene   of trial for the critical methodologies of deconstruction, feminism, new   historicism, psychoanalytic poststructuralism, and cultural studies.   Jonathan   Crewe argues that the commitment in the prevailing criticism to   innovation,   transgression, and radical change has increasingly obscured some   powerfully   conservative elements both in Renaissance culture and in these critical   discourses themselves.  In a reading of the poets Wyatt, Surrey, and Gascoigne, and of the   biographies   of Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey, Crewe focuses on the relatively   stable   poetic and cultural forms operative in the Renaissance. He argues that   these   established forms, which shape poetic composition, social interaction,   and   individual identity, are subject to only limited reconstruction by   English   authors in the sixteenth century. They both facilitate and limit   literary and   social expression and result in more sharply conflicted literary   production than   contemporary critics have been willing to acknowledge. Crewe   concentrates on   authors whose canonical status is somewhat precarious and intentionally   shifts   the emphasis away from the Elizabethan period and toward that of Henry   VIII.   Trials of Authorship redraws the existing picture of the English   Renaissance in   the sixteenth century.

Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare (New Historicism) PDF

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