Center Or Margin

"Center or Margin: Revisions of the English Renaissance in Honor of Leeds Barroll" includes essays by Catherine Belsey, Harry Berger, Jr., Philippa Berry, Raphael Falco, Jean E. Howard, Lena Cowen Orlin, Patricia Parker, Phyllis Rackin, Bruce R. Smith, Barbara Maria Stafford, Peter Stallybrass, and Susanne Woods. With sections on "England at the Margins," "Researching the Renaissance," "The Human Figure on the Stage," and "Artificial Persons," the collection makes interventions in historiography as well as history, literary interpretation, and also literary criticism. Some of the issues are England's marginal status in the sixteenth- and seventeenth- century world; the re-centering strategies of the Renaissance public theater in both time and space; mutually reinforcing fallacies engendered by common practices of canon formation and historical narrative; the central meanings of marginal characters in Shakespeare and Milton; and the re-historicizing of human sensory perception, early modern subjectivity and self-presentation, group dynamics, and post-structural theory. Lena Cowen Orlin is Professor of English at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America.