Overview

This collection demonstrates how, in early modern literary studies, close reading has its greatest force when we bring our attentive practices of textual analysis not only to the form but also the matter of our texts. The short, innovative essays included in this collection use original research to show how both form and materiality in the early modern period are inextricably bound up with each other, as well as with questions of embodiment and exclusion, sexual desire and colonial thinking. The essays illuminate the conditions of how we do early modern studies now, from issues about archival access in the postcolonial world to the core practices on which our discipline is based. Literary Form After Matter provides a defence of the shared, detailed attention that the practice of close reading demands, and the rich rewards it can offer.

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9781399551885

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Reviews

A new generation of scholarship that explodes assumptions about the neutrality of close reading! Influenced by work on colonialism, disability, queer and trans histories, women’s writing, and more, these essays unmask the ethical stakes of methodology, revealing textual analysis as deeply embedded in actions and affects, labour and lived experiences. -- Erika T. Lin, CUNY Graduate Center

A new generation of scholarship that explodes assumptions about the neutrality of close reading! Influenced by work on colonialism, disability, queer and trans histories, women’s writing, and more, these essays unmask the ethical stakes of methodology, revealing textual analysis as deeply embedded in actions and affects, labour and lived experiences. -- Erika T. Lin, City University of New York

Author Information

Katherine Hunt is Lecturer in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Literature at the University of East Anglia. Her work has been widely published in edited collections and journals including English Literary Renaissance and Renaissance Studies, and she is completing a book about bronze, writing, and processes of making in early modern English literature. Dianne Mitchell is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her book Paper Intimacies in the Early Modern Lyric (2026) explores the strange forms of closeness that emerge at the intersections of poetic form and Renaissance manuscript culture. She has published articles in Modern Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, English Literary Renaissance, and Studies in Philology as well as essays on gender and material culture in several recent collections.

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