"Self-Fashioning in the Renaissance: From More to Shakespeare" Author: [US] Stephen Greenblatt Producer: Baideya

★★Reconstructing the knowledge world of the Renaissance and opening up a new paradigm for Renaissance research★★

★★Going back and forth between aesthetic fantasy and historical reflection, bringing continuous intellectual impact and challenging our ideological conventions★★

★★A classic pioneering work by Stephen Greenblatt, a representative of New Historicist literary criticism, the most influential literary criticism since TS Eliot, which completely changed the landscape of criticism★★

Rereading The Making of the Renaissance Self, I felt in this book many traces of this extremely confused era. These traces were particularly evident when I witnessed the strong evil forces determined to crush all resistance; when I tried to explain that they targeted strangers and manipulated the threats they felt to consolidate their power; and when I felt uneasy that those who opposed this power also embodied some of its prominent characteristics. - Stephen Greenblatt

-Media Recommendation-

Since its first edition in 1980, The Making of the Renaissance has brought a continuous intellectual impact to people. Greenblatt's classic work leads readers to frequently travel between aesthetic fantasy and historical reflection, reconstructing the world of the Renaissance intellectual elite in the discourse of literary modernity. - Homi Bhabha

One day we were teaching students about the dull literature of the Renaissance, the next day The Making of the Renaissance Self was published, and suddenly Renaissance studies was a new and exciting field of study. Stephen Greenblatt's book revolutionized the critical landscape - it convincingly showed that social anthropology and psychoanalysis were essential tools for understanding Renaissance literary texts. I can't think of anyone's literary criticism since TS Eliot that has had such an impact. - Lisa Jardine

"The Making of the Renaissance Self," a classic in the humanities, inspired two generations of scholars to read books in a new light and to practice what they read. Today, the arguments in the book continue to challenge people's conventional thinking as much as when they were first proposed. --Anthony Grafton

Anyone who reads Greenblatt's portraits of More, Tyndale, White, Shakespeare, and others will be moved and inspired by this humane, empathetic mode of interpretation. Greenblatt paints these "character portraits" with sharpness and detail in beautiful, clear prose, and every sentence in the book reveals the contradictions and complexities of his subject. --Harry Berger Jr.

-Editor's Recommendation-

★The theme of this book is self-shaping from More to Shakespeare. The author initially tried to understand "the role of human autonomy in constructing identity", but ultimately succumbed to a Foucault-style assertion: "The human subject itself... is an ideological product of power relations in a particular society". More was a product of the church, Tyndale was a supporter of the state, and White surrendered to the absolutist state; Spencer embraced state authority, Marlowe constructed himself in his unremitting resistance to power, and Shakespeare expressed subversive obedience to authority. In this sense, self-shaping is also self-destruction. In other words, they eagerly integrated into the system and authority to shape their self-identity, but such efforts often ultimately abolished the self as an individual, thus causing the loss of self.

But whether it is the author Greenblatt or the six characters in this book, they all understand that "I am the main creator of my own identity" is an illusion that cannot be abandoned. Even if the self is recognized as a fiction, giving up self-shaping means giving up the pursuit of freedom, giving up the self that one stubbornly insists on, and death.

★The pioneering work of New Historicist literary criticism

"Anthropological interpretation must be concerned less with the mechanisms of customs and institutions than with the interpretative constructions of experience by members of a society. Literary criticism, closely connected with this practice, must be aware that its status is that of interpretation, that its aim is to understand literature as part of the system of symbols that constitutes a particular culture; its proper goal, however difficult it may be, is cultural poetics." Literature "does not lead to the inner life, but exists as the inner life."

-Content Introduction-

This book is an exploration of life and literature in the 16th century. Stephen Greenblatt studies the structures of self-identity of the major literary figures of the English Renaissance - More, Tyndale, White, Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare - and argues that the intellectual, social, psychological and aesthetic structures that govern identity production changed in the early modern period, with profound effects on the literature of the era. This book is a classic text in the field of literary history and literary criticism. It is a must-read for researchers and students in the field of literature, as well as for all readers interested in English literature of the Renaissance and new historicist criticism.

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