Synopses & Reviews
In
The Story of All Things Marshall Grossman analyzes the influence of major cultural developments, as well as significant events in the lives of Renaissance poets, to show how specific narratives characterize distinctive conceptions of the self in relation to historical action. To explore these conceptions of the self, Grossman focuses on the narrative poetry in the English Renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Relating subjectivity to the nature of language, Grossman uses the theories of Lacan to analyze the concept of the self as it encounters a transforming environment. He shows how ideological tensions arose from the reorganization and "modernization" of social life in revolutionary England and how the major poets of the time represented the division of the self in writings that are suspended between lyric and narrative genres. Beginning with the portrayals of the self inherited from Augustine, Dante, and Petrarch, he describes the influence of historic developments such as innovations in agricultural technology, civil war and regicide, and the emergence of republican state institutions on the changing representation of characters in the works of Spenser, Donne, Marvell, and Milton. Furthering this psychoanalytic critique of literary history, Grossman probes the linguistic effects of social and personal factors such as Augustine’s strained relationship with his mother and the marital disharmony of Milton and Mary Powell. With its focus on these and other "literary historical events," The Story of All Things not only proposes a new structural theory of narrative but constitutes a significant challenge to New Historicist conceptions of the self.
Review
"The Story of All Things makes a major contribution to the literary history of the English Renaissance and to the theory of modernity and the modern subject. Grossman takes up what are surely the most compelling and widely discussed questions in literary studies today. . . with an elegance that makes the book as beautiful as it is important, as pleasurable to read as it is necessary to be read."—David Lee Miller, University of Kentucky
Review
"Compelling, provocative, original, and often brilliant."—Laura Lunger Knoppers, Pennsylvania State University
Synopsis
Explores the ways in which large historic processes--e.g., the technological mastery of nature, a world-wide market economy--and important events in the lives of individual authors interact to affect the representation of character in the English Renaissa
About the Author
Marshall Grossman is Professor of English at the University of Maryland and is author of ‘Authors to Themselves’: Milton and the Revelation of History.