The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time (Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation and Appropriation) [Hardcover]

Gregory M. Colón Semenza (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0230100287 | ISBN-13: 978-0230100282 | Publication Date: April 27, 2010

Despite the explosion of scholarship on Shakespeare in popular culture, too little attention has been paid to the Renaissance itself as an imagined historical period. The English Renaissance in Popular Culture considers popular culture’s confrontations with the history, thought, and major figures of the English Renaissance. Analyzing “period films,” appropriations, television productions, popular literature, pastimes such as Ren Faires, and even punk music, its contributors explore the rich ways in which popular culture seeks to engage the Renaissance. Ultimately, this important collection asks how such popular engagements impact the teaching and the cultural importance of English Renaissance literature and history.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“With admirable breadth and wit, The English Renaissance in Popular Culture illuminates how far modern mass culture's fascination with its counterpart, the culture of early modern England, extends beyond Shakespeare. The range of materials explored—from silent film to punk music, The Tudors TV series to Renaissance fairs, historical fiction to horror films—is especially praiseworthy, as is the critical intelligence and ingenuity with which the contributors analyze how our own culture has been shaped by imaginative and often surprising identifications with the English Renaissance. The intersection of Renaissance scholarship and contemporary cultural studies in this well-conceived collection makes for a thought-provoking, exciting, timely and original contribution to study of the English past in the popular present.”—Douglas M. Lanier, Professor of English, University of New Hampshire

About the Author

Greg Colón Semenza is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.  He is the author of Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance, Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities and, with Laura L. Knoppers, Milton in Popular Culture. He has also published numerous essays on such popular culture topics as Tim Blake Nelson’s “O,” children’s versions of Milton’s Comus, and Shakespeare: The Animated Tales.  Semenza currently is at work on a monograph entitled Fictional Milton and his first novel, Race of Worshippers. 

Product Details

• Hardcover: 242 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (April 27, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0230100287
• ISBN-13: 978-0230100282
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,846,604 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)