Rogues and Early Modern English Culture

Rating:
Summary: An Indispensable Collection
Review: This new collection of essays is a unique volume that will not remain that way. The rogue literature of the English Renaissance has been underappreciated for too long, and this work is a significant step toward greater popularity and increased scholarly interest. The essays in this volume demonstrate why Renaissance rogue literature should be of considerable contemporary interest by showing how a social underclass is culturally constructed and how that class reflects the dominant culture in revealing ways.
Like any collection of essays, this collection is a bit uneven in quality, and among the best are three that are reprinted from earlier publications, but most of the essays are very good indeed. And, given the rather narrow historical subject matter, the treatments of rogues in the volume are surprisingly wide-ranging both in material and in theoretical approaches.
This is an important book--one that every early modern scholar needs and that even non-scholars can read with pleasure.

Rating:
Summary: An Indispensable Collection
Review: This new collection of essays is a unique volume that will not remain that way. The rogue literature of the English Renaissance has been underappreciated for too long, and this work is a significant step toward greater popularity and increased scholarly interest. The essays in this volume demonstrate why Renaissance rogue literature should be of considerable contemporary interest by showing how a social underclass is culturally constructed and how that class reflects the dominant culture in revealing ways.
Like any collection of essays, this collection is a bit uneven in quality, and among the best are three that are reprinted from earlier publications, but most of the essays are very good indeed. And, given the rather narrow historical subject matter, the treatments of rogues in the volume are surprisingly wide-ranging both in material and in theoretical approaches.
This is an important book--one that every early modern scholar needs and that even non-scholars can read with pleasure.