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Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton
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Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton
280Hardcover
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Overview
Escobedo examines how John Foxe, John Dee, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton used narrative representations of nationhood to mediate what they perceived as a troubling breach in history, attempting to bring together the English past, present, and near future in a complete and continuous story. Yet all four authors also register their concern that historical loss may be an inevitable feature of a "modern" England, and they come to see their narratives as long tapestries that spontaneously rip apart as they grow, obliging the weaver to return to repair them. Focusing on Renaissance England's perplexing sense of its time-boundedness, Escobedo presents early national consciousness as stranded awkwardly between the premodern and modern.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780801441745 |
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Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
Publication date: | 02/11/2004 |
Pages: | 280 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
What People are Saying About This
Andrew Escobedo develops here the highly original argument that English nationhood issued not from the emerging conviction of a shared national culture but rather from a profound experience of historical alienation from a distant past. Alert to the mythmaking that bolsters the search for national origins in a necessarily misty past, Escobedo brilliantly analyzes the various collective fictions produced under the rubric of history that helped engender England's burgeoning sense of national consciousness.
Andrew Escobedo's critical narrative about 'the ontology of early national consciousness' is lucid, learned, embedded in recent scholarship, and above all humane and original. He maps his narrative across a wide-ranging grid: for each of three historical modes—antiquarian, apocalyptic, fictional—he creates a 'diachronic' narrative linking two of his title authors: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton. The book constitutes a profound meditation on the English Renaissance project of plucking a new national identity out of a distinct historical trauma: under pressure from an absent national origin and an ever-looming apocalyptic imminence, these authors help forge the nation not as an ideological site for conformity or resistance but as an innovative community that prepares for the Enlightenment model of historical progress.
Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England is an important contribution to the study of Renaissance historiography and to current scholarship on several of the most significant early modern English writers. The book examines Michel de Certeau's insight that the act of historical recovery paradoxically entails a simultaneous act of historical distancing. Andrew Escobedo applies de Certeau's concept to an English context, leading to rich and original readings of the texts that helped to forge the consciousness of the English nation.