Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare [Paperback]

Stephen Greenblatt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 1983

"A book which no one concerned with Western culture in or since the Renaissance should miss."--Richard Strier, Boundary 2

Editorial Reviews

Review

"No one who has read [Greenblatt's] accounts of More, Tyndale, Wyatt, and others can fail to be moved, as well as enlightened, by an interpretive mode which is as humane and sympathetic as it is analytical. These portraits are poignantly, subtly, and minutely rendered in a beautifully lucid prose alive in every sentence to the ambivalences and complexities of its subjects." - Harry Berger Jr., University of California, Santa Cruz" --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Stephen Greenblatt is the Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including, with Catherine Gallagher, Practicing New Historicism, published by the University of Chicago Press, and the recent Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 332 pages
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press (December 15, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226306542
• ISBN-13: 978-0226306544
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #181,244 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #67 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Movements & Periods

More About the Author

Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, he is the author of nine books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, and Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. He has edited six collections of criticism, is the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. He honors include the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize, for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Greenblatt Practices Un-theoretical Theory, May 24, 2000

By 

wilson brissett (Bristol, Virginia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Paperback)

This early example of Stephen Greenblatt's literary reading practice agrees with his theory is general. Often labeled an adherent of the new historicism (a literary theory that ascribes the authorship of books to communities and communities to books), Greenblatt shirks that title here in favor of his own phrase "cultural poetics." He explores Renaissance works, from obscure spiritual pamphlets to Shakespeare's "Othello," showing how each text is not authored by a single, coherent authorial consciousness, but is rather the product of complexly intertwined social forces, almost like an insect caught in a spider's web.

Greenblatt boldly asserts that there is no individual genius behind Shakespeare's plays, an example of the end toward which his brand of reading techniuqes are directed. Early on, he claims that his technique is not a "theory" per se, but a reading "practice," a set of approaches to literature. This claim is not fully convinving, though, and while his assessment of how people create books and books create people is thoughtful, it is hard to accept his claim that his position is free from the totalizing assumptions of every other theory.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Utterly Helpful, October 21, 2007

By 

Emily Hobbit - See all my reviews

This review is from: Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Paperback)

I do not believe I would read this book on my own initiative to just "learn", for the authors' style simply does not work with my style of reading and comprehending. That said, this book is absolutely invaluable for research on major Renaissance authors. The bibliographies and sources cited within his essays are also utterly helpful should more sources be needed for the project at hand. I will admit that at times I find the essays to ramble on a little, but I have always been a to-the-point writer. Those same endless sentences also make wonderful cited quotations, so I cannot complain too much.

Perfect for any student of Renaissance literature, or the Renaissance intellectual.

28 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Book on the Renaissance Ever, February 23, 2001

By 

Richard Burt - See all my reviews

This review is from: Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Paperback)

OK. So maybe I'm biased. I took a course from Greenblatt when an undergard at U.C. Berekely, and he then directed my dissertation when I took my Ph.D. From U.C. Berkeley as well. But I am not alone in regarding this book as a masterpiece, exteremely well-written adn insightful. This book transformed not only the study of the Renaissance but of English literature in general. Moreover, it has influenced historians such as Natalie Daivis and anthropologists. After 17 years, Renaissance Self-Fashioning totally stands up. The chapters on Wyatt, Tyndale, More (truly stellar), Spenser, and Shakespeare remained unsurpassed. Readers may quibble, but though whose do have never written and will never write a book anywhere remotely near the excellence of Greeblatt's. It is truly inspired and deservedly influential.