Routledge Research Companion to Anglo-Italian Renaissance Literature and Culture

<p>The aim of this Companion volume is to provide scholars and advanced graduate students with a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of current research work on Anglo-Italian Renaissance studies. Written by a team of international scholars and experts in the field the chapters are grouped into two large areas of influence and intertextuality corresponding to the dual way in which early modern England looked upon the Italian world from the English perspective – Part 1: Italian literature and culture and Part 2: Appropriations and ideologies. In the first part prominent Italian authors artists and thinkers are examined as a direct source of inspiration imitation and divergence. The variegated English response to the cultural ideological and political implications of pervasive Italian intertextuality in interrelated aspects of artistic and generic production is dealt with in the second part. Constructed on the basis of a largely interdisciplinary approach the volume offers an in-depth and wide-ranging treatment of the multifaceted ways in which Italy’s material world and its iconologies are represented appropriated and exploited in the literary and cultural domain of early modern England. For this reason contributors were asked to write essays that not only reflect current thinking but also point to directions for future research and scholarship while a purposefully conceived bibliography of primary and secondary sources and a detailed index round off the volume.</p>