The immaterial book : reading and romance in early modern England / Sarah Wall-Randell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wall-Randell, Sarah.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Books and reading in literature.

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English literature.

Romances, English--History and criticism.

Romances, English.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : The University of Michigan Press, [2013]

System Details:

text file

Summary:

In romances-Renaissance England's version of the fantasy novel-characters often discover books that turn out to be magical or prophetic and to offer insights into their readers' selves. The Immaterial Book examines scenes of reading in important romance texts across genres: Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Cymbeline and The Tempest, Wrath's Urania, and Cervantes's Don Quixote. It offers a response to "material book studies" by calling for a new focus on imaginary or "immaterial" books and argues that early modern romance authors, rather than replicating contemporary reading practices within their texts, are reviving ancient and medieval ideas of the book as a conceptual framework, which they use to investigate urgent, new ideas about the self and the self-conscious mind. Book jacket.

Contents:

"Antiquities, which no body can know": Spenser's books and the romance of the past

Dreaming of the book in Cymbeline

"Volumes that I prize": the spaces of the book and the mind in The Tempest

"A booke layd by, new lookt on": the romance of reading in Urania and Don Quixote.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 165-177) and index.

Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

9780472118779

9780472029143

Publisher Number:

10.3998/mpub.4765277

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.