ABSTRACT

This collection of essays historicizes and theorizes forgetting in English Renaissance literary texts and their cultural contexts. Its essays open up an area of study overlooked by contemporary Renaissance scholarship, which is too often swayed by a critical paradigm devoted to the "art of memory." This volume recovers the crucial role of forgetting in producing early modernity's subjective and collective identities, desires and fantasies.

chapter |18 pages

Introduction

Sites of forgetting in early modern English literature and culture

part |2 pages

Part I

chapter 1|20 pages

The decay of memory

chapter 3|12 pages

Pleasure’s oblivion

Displacements of generation in Spenser’s Faerie Queene

part |2 pages

Part II

chapter 5|14 pages

Off the subject

Early modern poets on rhyme, distraction, and forgetfulness

part |2 pages

PART III Narratives

chapter 7|12 pages

“The religion I was born in”

Forgetting Catholicism and remembering the king in Donne’s Devotions

chapter 8|13 pages

Legends of oblivion

Enchantment and enslavement in Book 6 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene

part |2 pages

PART IV Localities

chapter 10|14 pages

“Unless you could teach me to forget”

Spectatorship, self-forgetting, and subversion in antitheatrical literature and As You Like It

chapter 11|14 pages

Reading reformed

Spenser and the problem of the English library