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Cathrine O. FrankPaperback
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Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature
«In Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature, Stephanie Elsky extends methodologies for the study of English literature rooted in new historicism from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Elsky theorizes "custom" as a matter of cultural and political discourse relevant for sixteenth-century English literature in relation to proverbial language, common law, constitutionalism, and ideas of temporality.»
Timothy D. Crowley, Northern Illinois University, Journal of British Studies
Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature argues that, ironically, custom was a supremely generative literary force for a range of Renaissance writers. Custom took on so much power because of its virtual synonymity with English common law, the increasingly dominant legal system that was also foundational to England's constitutionalist politics. Les mer
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Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature argues that, ironically, custom was a supremely generative literary force for a range of Renaissance writers. Custom took on so much power because of its virtual synonymity with English common law, the increasingly dominant legal system that was also foundational to England's constitutionalist politics. The strange temporality assigned to legal custom, that is, its purported existence
since 'time immemorial', furnished it with a unique and paradoxical capacity-to make new and foreign forms familiar. This volume shows that during a time when novelty was suspect, even insurrectionary, appeals to the widespread understanding of custom as a legal concept justified a startling array of
fictive experiments.
This is the first book to reveal fully the relationship between Renaissance literature and legal custom. It shows how writers were able to reimagine moments of historical and cultural rupture as continuity by appealing to the powerful belief that English legal custom persisted in the face of conquests by foreign powers. Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature thus challenges scholarly narratives in which Renaissance art breaks with a past it looks
back upon longingly and instead argues that the period viewed its literature as imbued with the aura of the past. In this way, through experiments in rhetoric and form, literature unfolds the processes whereby custom gains its formidable and flexible political power. Custom, a key concept of legal and
constitutionalist thought, shaped sixteenth-century literature, while this literature, in turn, transformed custom into an evocative mythopoetic.
since 'time immemorial', furnished it with a unique and paradoxical capacity-to make new and foreign forms familiar. This volume shows that during a time when novelty was suspect, even insurrectionary, appeals to the widespread understanding of custom as a legal concept justified a startling array of
fictive experiments.
This is the first book to reveal fully the relationship between Renaissance literature and legal custom. It shows how writers were able to reimagine moments of historical and cultural rupture as continuity by appealing to the powerful belief that English legal custom persisted in the face of conquests by foreign powers. Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature thus challenges scholarly narratives in which Renaissance art breaks with a past it looks
back upon longingly and instead argues that the period viewed its literature as imbued with the aura of the past. In this way, through experiments in rhetoric and form, literature unfolds the processes whereby custom gains its formidable and flexible political power. Custom, a key concept of legal and
constitutionalist thought, shaped sixteenth-century literature, while this literature, in turn, transformed custom into an evocative mythopoetic.
Detaljer
- Forlag
- Oxford University Press
- Innbinding
- Innbundet
- Språk
- Engelsk
- ISBN
- 9780198861430
- Utgivelsesår
- 2020
- Format
- 24 x 17 cm
Anmeldelser
«In Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature, Stephanie Elsky extends methodologies for the study of English literature rooted in new historicism from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Elsky theorizes "custom" as a matter of cultural and political discourse relevant for sixteenth-century English literature in relation to proverbial language, common law, constitutionalism, and ideas of temporality.»
Timothy D. Crowley, Northern Illinois University, Journal of British Studies
«This stunning and substantial book combines historical study, literary analysis, and theoretical reflection. … Throughout the book, Elsky nimbly handles custom's immemorial resistance to the impulse to periodize, making the work we do as scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a little more challenging-and a lot more interesting.»
Julia Reinhard Lupton, UC- Irvine, Law and Literature
«In Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature, Stephanie Elsky offers a prescient study of historical continuity, one that challenges notions of epistemic change, periodization, and even historical consciousness ... Grounding her study in an extensive excavation of the uses of custom, Elsky illuminates the surprising range of possibility -- specifically literary possibility -- within this familiar concept.»
Rebecca Lemon, The New Rambler
«[Elsky's] book offers a new, compelling and optimistic framework for reading English literature's conceptual debt to law in the early modern period, as well as for thinking about its legacy for our own times.»
Lorna Hutson, Law and History Review
«Custom, Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature provides the most wide-ranging account to date of the conceptual machinery of custom and custom's key place in the legal imaginary of the period. The book distinguishes itself by showing not simply how legal culture was reflected, commented on, or critiqued by plays and poems, but rather how law generated habits of thought that shaped both formal and material components of writing and reading literature. This sort of critical nuance aligns Elsky's book with the very best work being done on literature and law. It will be required reading for anyone interested in the intersections of literary and legal culture in the early modern period.»
Kevin Curran, Professor of Early Modern Literature, University of Lausanne
«This sophisticated book is a fascinating combination of legal history, political thought and literary analysis, illuminating a central aspect of how precisely a modern 'historical consciousness' was born in Renaissance England.»
Modern Language Studies
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