Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England
In Untold Futures, J. K. Barret locates models for recovering the variety of futures imagined within some of our most foundational literature. These poems, plays, and prose fictions reveal how Renaissance writers embraced uncertain potential to think about their own present moment and their own place in time. The history of the future that Barret reconstructs looks beyond futures implicitly dismissed as impossible or aftertimes defined by inevitability and fixed perspective. Chapters on Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost trace instead a persistent interest in an indeterminate, earthly future evident in literary constructions that foreground anticipation and expectation.
Barret argues that the temporal perspectives embedded in these literary texts unsettle some of our most familiar points of reference for the period by highlighting an emerging cultural self-consciousness capable of registering earthly futures predicated on the continued sameness of time rather than radical ruptures in it. Rather than mapping a particular future, these writers generate imaginative access to a range of futures. Barret makes a strong case for the role of language itself in emerging conceptualizations of temporality.
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Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England
In Untold Futures, J. K. Barret locates models for recovering the variety of futures imagined within some of our most foundational literature. These poems, plays, and prose fictions reveal how Renaissance writers embraced uncertain potential to think about their own present moment and their own place in time. The history of the future that Barret reconstructs looks beyond futures implicitly dismissed as impossible or aftertimes defined by inevitability and fixed perspective. Chapters on Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost trace instead a persistent interest in an indeterminate, earthly future evident in literary constructions that foreground anticipation and expectation.
Barret argues that the temporal perspectives embedded in these literary texts unsettle some of our most familiar points of reference for the period by highlighting an emerging cultural self-consciousness capable of registering earthly futures predicated on the continued sameness of time rather than radical ruptures in it. Rather than mapping a particular future, these writers generate imaginative access to a range of futures. Barret makes a strong case for the role of language itself in emerging conceptualizations of temporality.
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Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England
In Untold Futures, J. K. Barret locates models for recovering the variety of futures imagined within some of our most foundational literature. These poems, plays, and prose fictions reveal how Renaissance writers embraced uncertain potential to think about their own present moment and their own place in time. The history of the future that Barret reconstructs looks beyond futures implicitly dismissed as impossible or aftertimes defined by inevitability and fixed perspective. Chapters on Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost trace instead a persistent interest in an indeterminate, earthly future evident in literary constructions that foreground anticipation and expectation.
Barret argues that the temporal perspectives embedded in these literary texts unsettle some of our most familiar points of reference for the period by highlighting an emerging cultural self-consciousness capable of registering earthly futures predicated on the continued sameness of time rather than radical ruptures in it. Rather than mapping a particular future, these writers generate imaginative access to a range of futures. Barret makes a strong case for the role of language itself in emerging conceptualizations of temporality.
J. K. Barret is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.
Table of Contents
Introduction1. Promising the Future: The Language of Obligation in Sidney's Old Arcadia2. The History of the Future: Spenser's The Faerie Queene and the Directions of Time3. The Fiction of the Future: Dangerous Reading in Titus Andronicus4. Shakespeare's Second Future: Anticipatory Nostalgia in Cymbeline5. Imminent Futures: Absent Art and Improvised Rhyme in Antony and Cleopatra and CymbelineAfterword: Circles of the Future: Memory or Monument in Paradise Lost
What People are Saying About This
Michael Schoenfeldt
Untold Futures is one of those rare books that will make an entire field view familiar material in a new and profound light. In prose that is at once agile and rigorous, J. K. Barret shrewdly reminds us that this period named the Renaissance is not just involved in the rediscovery of classical antiquity, but also in the effort to imagine possibilities for the future.
Jenny C. Mann
Untold Futures is marvelous, both erudite and clever, and also contains beautiful writing. It offers an important new perspective on early modern historiography. Diverging from nearly all other studies of Renaissance conceptions of time, J. K. Barret uncovers a persistent interest in the earthly future (with all of its uncertainties) in some of the most important texts in the canon of Renaissance literature.
Jesse M. Lander
In Untold Futures, J. K. Barret provides a fluent account of a fascinating topic. The question of temporality and its relationship to Renaissance literature is compelling, and Barret writes engagingly, providing illuminating, supple, and sophisticated readings of a variety of texts.
