The English Renaissance

Alistair Fox was educated at the University of Canterbury (MA) and the University of Western Ontario, where he took his doctorate as a Commonwealth Scholar. He has held visiting fellowships at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and All Souls College, Oxford, and is currently Professor of English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His previous books include Thomas More: History and Providence (1982); Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics, and Reform, 1500-1550 (with John Guy) (1986); Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (1989); and Utopia: An Elusive Vision (1993).

Acknowledgements. Introduction.

1. The Reception of Italian Literary Culture: Motives and Dynamics.

2. Wyatt, Surrey, and the Onset of English Petrarchism.

3. Elizabethan Petrarchism and the Protestant Location of Self.

4. Ethic and Politic Considerations: Spenser, Sidney, and the Uses of Italianate Pastoral.

5. Epic and the Formation of National Identity: Ariosto, Tasso, and The Faerie Queene.

6. Appraising 'The Seeming Truths' of the Times: the Italianate Plays of Shakespeare.

Conclusion.

Bibliography.

Index.