Yearly volume of the best essays submitted to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, focusing on sexuality in Elizabethan poetry, Renaissance drama and its links to the wider culture, and on seventeenth-century literature.

Yearly volume of the best essays submitted to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, focusing on sexuality in Elizabethan poetry, Renaissance drama and its links to the wider culture, and on seventeenth-century literature.

Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2012 volume opens with two essays on sexuality in Elizabethan narrative poetry: on homoeroticism in Spenser'sFaerie Queene and on Shakespeare's "swerve" into Lucretian imagery inVenus and Adonis. The volume then turns to Renaissance drama and its links to the wider culture: the commodification of spirit in Marlowe'sDoctor Faustus, Shakespeare's evocation of the Acts of the Apostles inThe Comedy of Errors, "summoning" inHamlet andKing Lear, discourses of procreation and generation inAntony and Cleopatra, trade and gender in John Webster'sDevil's Law-Case, and an examination of street scenes inRomeo and Juliet in relation to Paul's Cross Churchyard, the hub of the London bookselling market in the early modern period. The volume closes with essays on seventeenth-century literature and literary culture: on the "puritan logic" of the elder Andrew Marvell in his famous son's poem "To His Coy Mistress," on the "sociable lexicography" of a Royalist polymath attempting to reconcile with the English Commonwealth, and on the underestimated roles of Urania in Milton'sParadise Lost.

Contributors: David Ainsworth, Thomas W. Dabbs, Sonya Freeman Loftis, Russell Hugh McConnell, Robert L. Reid, Amrita Sen, Susan C. Staub, Emily Stockard, Nathan Stogdill, Christina A. Taormina, Emma Annette Wilson. Andrew Shifflett and Edward Gieskes are Associate Professors of English at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.

Reconstructing the Bower of Bliss: Homoerotic Myth-Making inThe Faerie Queene
Ovid, Lucretius, and the Grounded Goddess in Shakespeare'sVenus and Adonis
The Soul as Commodity: Materialism inDoctor Faustus
Antipholus and the Exorcists: The Acts of the Apostles in Shakespeare'sThe Comedy of Errors
Paul's Cross Churchyard and Shakespeare's Verona Youth
The Summoning of Hamlet and Lear
"Bred Now of Your Mud": Land, Generation, and Maternity inAntony and Cleopatra
Cosmetic Blackness: East Indies Trade, Gender, andThe Devil's Law-Case
From One Marvell to Another: Puritan Logic in "To His Coy Mistress"
"An Heap Is Form'd into an Alphabet": Thomas Blount's Sociable Lexicography
Getting Past the Ellipsis: The Spirit and Urania inParadise Lost