Renaissance Self-Fashioning is a study of sixteenth-century life and
literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Stephen
Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major
literary figures of the English Renaissance--More, Tyndale, Wyatt,
Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare--and finds that in the early modern
period new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily
influenced the literature of the era. Now a classic text in literary
studies, Renaissance Self-Fashioning continues to be of interest to
students of the Renaissance, English literature, and the new historicist
tradition, and this new edition includes a preface by the author on the
book's creation and influence.
"No one who has read [Greenblatt's] accounts of More, Tyndale, Wyatt,
and others can fail to be moved, as well as enlightened, by an
interpretive mode which is as humane and sympathetic as it is
analytical. These portraits are poignantly, subtly, and minutely
rendered in a beautifully lucid prose alive in every sentence to the
ambivalences and complexities of its subjects."--Harry Berger Jr.,
University of California, Santa Cruz