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Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity

Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity

Paperback

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0268033250
ISBN13: 9780268033255
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: May 15 2013
Pages: 296
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.70 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

In Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity, William Kuskin asks us to reconsider the relationship between literary form and historical period. As Kuskin observes, most current literary histories of medieval and early modern English literature hew to period, presenting the Middle Ages and modernity as discrete, separated by a heterodox and unstable fifteenth century. In contrast, the major writers of the sixteenth century--Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, the Holinshed Syndicate, and their editors--were intense readers of the fifteenth century and consciously looked back to its history and poetry as they shaped their own. Kuskin examines their work in light of the writings they knew--that of Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, William Caxton, and the anonymous London Chronicles--to demonstrate that fifteenth-century textual forms exist within the most significant statements of literary modernity. In short, by reconsidering the relationship between literary form and temporality, we can reach across the firewall of 1500 to write a more complex literary history of reading and writing than has previously been told.

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