English Fictions of Communal Identity, 1485–1603

Description

Challenging a long-standing trend that sees the Renaissance as the end of communal identity and constitutive group affiliation, author Joshua Phillips explores the perseverance of such affiliation throughout Tudor culture. Focusing on prose fiction from Malory's Morte Darthur through the works of Sir Philip Sidney and Thomas Nashe, this study explores the concept of collective agency and the extensive impact it had on English Renaissance culture. In contrast to studies devoted to the myth of early modern individuation, English Fictions of Communal Identity, 1485-1603 pays special attention to primary communities-monastic orders, printing house concerns, literary circles, and neighborhoods-that continued to generate a collective sense of identity. Ultimately, Phillips offers a new way of theorizing the relation between collaboration and identity. In terms of literary history, this study elucidates a significant aspect of novelistic discourse, even as it accounts for the institutional disregard of often brilliant works of early modern fiction. Cover Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Violence of Singularity Part I: Belonging and Belongings 1 The Caxtonian Imaginary: Knights and the Dreams of the Abbey-Lubbers 2 Staking Claims to Utopia: Thomas More, Prose Fiction, and the Matter of Belonging Part II: Knowing Together, Laboring Together 3 William Baldwin and Communities of Fiction 4 Anthony Munday, Romance, and the Production of Collective Selves Part III: Broken Music: Re-imagining Collective Subjectivity 5 Hoc Opus, Hic Labor Est: Sir Philip Sidney and the Work of Shame 6 Thomas Nashe, Thy Unworthy Speaker to the World Conclusion: A Piece of the Main Bibliography Index