The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the Ne World [Hardcover]

In this 1997 book, leading scholars demonstrate the increasing importance and diversity of prose in the early modern period.What were the possibilities of prose as a literary medium in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? And how did it operate in the literary and social world? In this wide-ranging study leading scholars of the early modern literatures of Europe and the colonial Americas address such questions. They consider familiar and lesser-known prose works, and reflect on prose's intersections with social and cultural life. Overall, they demonstrate the increasing visibility and diversity of prose as a medium in the early modern period.What were the possibilities of prose as a literary medium in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? And how did it operate in the literary and social world? In this wide-ranging study leading scholars of the early modern literatures of Europe and the colonial Americas address such questions. They consider familiar and lesser-known prose works, and reflect on prose's intersections with social and cultural life. Overall, they demonstrate the increasing visibility and diversity of prose as a medium in the early modern period.What were the possibilities of prose as a literary medium in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? And how did it operate in the literary and social worlds? The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World brings together ten new essays by leading scholars of the literatures of England, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, and the colonial Americas, to answer these questions in wide-ranging ways. Several of the essays shed new light on landmark prose works of the period; some discuss what lesser-known writings reveal about the medium; others move between the literary and the nonliterary to reflect on the medium's intersections with history, fiction, subjectivity, the state, science, and other aspects of social and cultural life. Overall, this collection will provoke an international reconsidelC–