ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides the formation of the literary canons in early modern France and England, by way of readings of four authors whose work displays a concern for the role of a literary canon in an emergent national state. It focuses on the ways that these authors, Joachim Du Bellay, Edmund Spenser, Michel de Montaigne, and William Shakespeare, engage in strategies of rewriting the literary work of other places and times. The book explores that each author not only redirects and transforms writing from other literary canons to the end of supporting the one to which he is contributing; he also reflects on the processes by which such incorporation of other texts takes place. It looks at how, through the rhetorical operations of their texts, they articulate the relationship of literary practices to the cultures in which they take place.
