Poetic Theory and Practice in Early Modern Verse: Unwritten Arts

How did ideas about the poet's art surface in early modern texts? By looking into the intersections between poetry, poetics and other discourses - logic, rhetoric, natural philosophy, medicine, mythography or religion - the essays in this volume unearth notions that remained largely unwritten in the official literary criticism of the period. Focusing on questions of poetry's origins and style, and exploring individual responses to issues of authenticity, career design, difficulty, or inspiration, this collection revisits and renews the critical lexicons that connect poetic theory and practice in early modern English texts and their European contexts. Reading canonical poets and critics - Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Puttenham, Dryden - alongside less studied figures such as Henry Constable, Barnabe Barnes, Thomas Lodge, Aemilia Lanyer, Fulke Greville or George Chapman, this book extends the coordinates for a dialogue between literary practice and the Renaissance theories from which they stemmed and which they helped to outgrow.

Zenón Luis-Martínez is Senior Lecturer of English at the University of Huelva (Spain), where he teaches medieval and early modern literature. He has edited Abraham Fraunce's The Shepherds' Logic and Other Dialectical Writings (2016) for the MHRA Critical Texts Series. He is the author of In Words and Deeds: The Spectacle of Incest in English Renaissance Tragedy (Rodopi, 2002). His articles on English Renaissance and Restoration literature have appeared in journals like ELH, Cahiers Élisabéthains, Parergon and English Studies. He has also coedited several collections, among them, with Luis Gómez Canseco, Between Shakespeare and Cervantes: Trails along the Renaissance (Newark, NJ: Juan de la Cuesta, 2006), and, with Sonia Hernández-Santano, the special issue Poetry, the Arts of Discourse and the Discourse of the Arts: Rethinking Renaissance Poetic Theory and Practice for Parergon (Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies). His current research includes a critical edition of Chapman's The Shadow of Night and Ovid's Banquet of Sense for the MHRA and a monograph on Chapman's poetics. He leads the Research Project "Towards a New Aesthetics of Elizabethan Poetry" (MINECO FFI2017-82269-P). Since May 2018 he is President of SEDERI (Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies).