"Ambition, Rank, and Poetry in 1590s England focuses on the early work of George Chapman and on the writings of others who shared his social agenda and his nonp

Is “ambitious” a compliment? It depends: “[A] masterpiece of intellectual and cultural history.”—David Brion Davis, author of Inhuman Bondage: The Ris

This book reveals the ways in which seventeenth-century poets used models of vision taken from philosophy, theology, scientific optics, political polemic and th

Why were sonnet sequences popular in Renaissance England? In this study, Christopher Warley suggests that sonneteers created a vocabulary to describe, and to in

This book explores how the myth of Narcissus, which is at once about self-love and self-destruction, desire and death, beauty and pain, became an ambivalent sym