Gathering Force: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1557–1623: Volume 1
Early Modern Literature in Transition Series

During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, England grew from a marginal to a major European power, established overseas settlements, and negotiated the Protestant Reformation. The population burgeoned and became increasingly urban. England also saw the meteoric rise of commercial theatre in London, the creation of a vigorous market for printed texts, and the emergence of writing as a viable profession. Literacy rates exploded, and an increasingly diverse audience encountered a profusion of new textual forms. Media, and literary culture, transformed on a scale that would not happen again until television and the Internet. The twenty innovative contributions in Gathering Force: Early Modern Literature in Transition, 1557?1623 trace ways that five different genres both spurred and responded to change. Chapters explore different facets of lyric poetry, romance, commercial drama, masques and pageants, and non-narrative prose. Exciting and accessible, this volume illuminates the dynamic relationships among the period's social, political, and literary transformations.

Part I. Generic Transitions: 1. The English sonnet: cycles and recycling Catherine Bates; 2. Romance: traditions and innovations Kenneth Borris; 3. Drama: forming an audience Lois Potter; 4. Pageants, masques, and entertainments: old rituals, new forms Lauren Shohet; 5. Arts of rhetoric: antique and modern Jenny C. Mann; Part II. Literature and Ideological Transformation: 6. Lyric and spiritualism: John Donne's 'The Ecstasy' Douglas Trevor; 7. Romance and the boundaries of genre and gender Andrew Hadfield; 8. Drama and globalization in early modern England Daniel J. Vitkus; 9. The court masque: art and politics Peter Holbrook; 10. Prose, science, and scripture: Francis Bacon's sacred texts Katherine Bootle Attié; Part III. Literature and Cultural Transformation: 11. Lyric and scientific epistemologies: Bacon and Donne Liza Blake; 12. Romance and the early modern cultures of the book Sarah Wall-Randell; 13. Drama and commodity culture in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus Bradley D. Ryner; 14. Pageantry and politics: the anxiety of arrival Tom Bishop; 15. Prose and the public sphere David Colclough; Part IV. Literature and Local Transformation: 16. 'Hard to meter well': psalms and early modern English poetry Lucía Martínez Valdivia; 17. Romance, magical space, and Wroth's Urania Sheila Cavanagh; 18. Drama and the playhouse Lucy Munro; 19. Greek tragedy on the university stage: Buchanan and Euripides Hannah Crawforth and Lucy Jackson; 20. Prose and the pulpit Lori Anne Ferrell.

Kristen Poole, Blue and Gold Distinguished Professor of English Renaissance Literature at the University of Delaware, is the author of Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000) and Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England: Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama (Cambridge, 2011). She is co-editor of The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England (Cambridge, 2018). Her research has been supported by the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Penn Humanities Forum.
Lauren Shohet, Professor of English at Villanova University, is the author of Reading Masques: The English Masque and Public Culture in the Seventeenth Century (2010) and editor of Temporality, Genre and Experience in the Age of Shakespeare: Forms of Time (2018). The author of numerous articles and book chapters on Milton, Shakespeare, Marvell, adaptation, and genre, she has won fellowships and prizes from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, the Mellon Foundation, the Shakespeare Association of America, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Freiburg (Germany) Institute of Advanced Studies.