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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture

Literary Form After Matter 1550–1700Experiments in Close Reading

Edited by Katherine Hunt and Dianne Mitchell

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£95.00

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About this book

Shows that form and materiality in early modern English literary texts must be understood together

  • Defines and defends the practice of close reading form and matter together
  • Assesses the field of early modern literary studies in the wake of new formalisms and the ‘material turn’
  • Forges connections between material texts and urgent questions in the study of disability, sexuality, and empire

This collection demonstrates how, in early modern literary studies, close reading has its greatest force when we bring our attentive practices of textual analysis not only to the form but also the matter of our texts. The short, innovative essays included in this collection use original research to show how both form and materiality in the early modern period are inextricably bound up with each other, as well as with questions of embodiment and exclusion, sexual desire and colonial thinking. The essays illuminate the conditions of how we do early modern studies now, from issues about archival access in the postcolonial world to the core practices on which our discipline is based. Literary Form After Matter provides a defence of the shared, detailed attention that the practice of close reading demands, and the rich rewards it can offer.

Reviews

A new generation of scholarship that explodes assumptions about the neutrality of close reading! Influenced by work on colonialism, disability, queer and trans histories, women’s writing, and more, these essays unmask the ethical stakes of methodology, revealing textual analysis as deeply embedded in actions and affects, labour and lived experiences.
Table of contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Series Editors' Preface

1. Introduction: Close Reading Form and Matter
Katherine Hunt and Dianne Mitchell

Part I. Embodying Form and Matter
2. 'Perfection in a Womans worke is rare’: Mary Oxlie’s Poetic Life
Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
3. Transmaterialities and Transformations in John Lyly’s The Woman in the Moon
Gillian Knoll
4. ‘I write this in an Alehouse’: The Engraved Title Page of Sir William Cornwallis’s Essayes (1632) and the Making of the Early Modern Essay
Sophie Butler
5. Travel Writing, Textiles, and Things
Natalya Din-Kariuki
6. Forms of Reading Crip Time: Look About You and Jjjjjerome Ellis’s transCRIPted (2020)
Katherine Schaap Williams

Part II. Attention and Obstruction
7. ‘I / Will petrify: Queering Influence in Early Modern Lyric
Gabriel Bloomfield
8. Robert Hooke’s Literary Point
Whitney Sperrazza
9. Poetic Freedom and the Stakes of Close Reading: Hester Pulter’s ‘Solitary Complaint’
Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich
10. ‘Let it be the thought’: Lancelot Andrewes, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce
Esther Osorio Whewell
11. ‘Flye into thistles Tharsis’: Material Spirituality in the Poetry of Lady Anne Southwell
Danielle Clarke
12. Forming Beauty in Shake-speares Sonnets
L. Bellee Jones-Pierce

Part III. Effaced and Enduring Forms
13. The Affordability of Matter: Access, Equity, and Digital Technology
Hannah August
14. Lost Letters, Found Forms: Reading Library Fragments
Megan Heffernan
15. A Common Matter? The Manuscript of Robert Hassall
Douglas Clark
16. Historical Views and Spenserian Form: A View of the Present State of Ireland in Time and Matter
Ali Madani
17. Idols of the Cave: Voices and Texts in Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia
Thomas Ward
18. ‘Disjointed by Candle-Light’
Alice Wickenden
19. ‘Their first matter’: Pasteboard Giants in Early Modern Writing
Lucy Razzall
20. Afterword
Adam Smyth

Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index

About the contributors

Katherine Hunt

Katherine Hunt is Lecturer in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Literature at the University of East Anglia. Her work has been widely published in edited collections and journals including English Literary Renaissance and Renaissance Studies, and she is completing a book about bronze, writing, and processes of making in early modern English literature.

Dianne Mitchell

Dianne Mitchell is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her book Paper Intimacies in the Early Modern Lyric (2026) explores the strange forms of closeness that emerge at the intersections of poetic form and Renaissance manuscript culture. She has published articles in Modern Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, English Literary Renaissance, and Studies in Philology as well as essays on gender and material culture in several recent collections.

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