Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Romance and the ethics of expansion
- PART I ROMANCE AND LAW
- 1 Transnational justice and the genre of romance
- 2 Natural law and charitable intervention in Sir Philip Sidney's Old Arcadia
- 3 Natural law and corrupt lawyers: Riche, Roberts, Johnson, and Warner
- 4 Spenser's legalization of the Irish Conquest
- PART II THE PREROGATIVE COURTS AND THE CONQUEST WITHIN
- Conclusion: English law and the early modern romance
- Index
1 - Transnational justice and the genre of romance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Romance and the ethics of expansion
- PART I ROMANCE AND LAW
- 1 Transnational justice and the genre of romance
- 2 Natural law and charitable intervention in Sir Philip Sidney's Old Arcadia
- 3 Natural law and corrupt lawyers: Riche, Roberts, Johnson, and Warner
- 4 Spenser's legalization of the Irish Conquest
- PART II THE PREROGATIVE COURTS AND THE CONQUEST WITHIN
- Conclusion: English law and the early modern romance
- Index
Summary
Romance fiction has often been derided as either too tedious to study in much depth or simply too primitive, disorganized, or conventional to engage contemporary political discourse in any meaningful way. In the last decade, however, a number of authors, including R. W. Maslen, Joan Pong Linton, and Blair Worden, have begun uncovering the complexity of these works' engagement with the ideological, political, nationalist, and legal discourses of the Renaissance period. To some degree, the prolonged prejudice against considering romance fiction from a more complex political standpoint may be due to the disparaging comments made by early modern critics themselves. Especially within the opposition of epic and romance, the romance has been forever denigrated as sub-standard. Today, the basic terms of this critical debate are still applied to the epic and romance forms even if contemporary critics have a greater sense than ever of the way in which the two forms are coterminous, virtually never existing in isolated form.
Modern critical discussion of epic and romance tends to reproduce the Renaissance understanding of epic as unified and that of romance as digressive. In the most nuanced recent foray into the subject of the epic/romance opposition, David Quint has focused on the political ideologies that attached themselves to the two generic forms. On the one hand, Quint has explored the way in which the epic genre continued during the Renaissance, as it had before, to be identified with the building of empire.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature , pp. 17 - 46Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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