Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson: Laureations

This book brings together new essays by leading cultural critics who have been influenced by the groundbreaking scholarship of Richard Helgerson. The original essays penned for this anthology evince the ongoing impact of Helgerson’s work in major critical debates including national identity, literary careerism, and studies of form. Analyzing not only early modern but also medieval literary texts, the pieces that comprise Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson: Laureations respond to both Helgerson’s more famous scholarly works and the whole range of his critical corpus, from his earliest work on prodigality to his latest writings on mid-sixteenth century European poets.  The interdisciplinary, transnational, and comparativist spirit of Helgerson’s criticism is reflected in the essays, as is his commitment to studies of multiple genres that nevertheless attend to the particularities of form.  Contributors offer new interpretations of several of Shakespeare’s plays—Hamlet, I Henry IV, The Tempest, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear—and other dramas such as Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, the anonymous drama The London Prodigal, and Stephen Greenblatt and John Mee’s contemporary play Cardenio.  In keeping with Helgerson’s comparativist turn, the volume includes analyses of Joachim Du Bellay’s poetry and Donato Gianotti’s discussion of The Divine Comedy. Prose works featured in the volume encompass More’s Utopia and Isaac Walton’s The Compleat Angler. Spenser’s early poetry and the medieval romance Floris and Blanchflour also receive new readings.  

Table of Contents:
Introduction by Roze Hentschell and Kathy Lavezzo Part I: Community, Colonialism, and Nationhood 1. Influence, Appropriation, Piracy: The Place of Spain in English Literary History by Barbara Fuchs 2. Idleness, Humanist Industry, and English Colonial Activity in Thomas More’s “fruitfull, pleasant,” “wittie” and “profitable” Utopia by Shannon Miller 3. Amorous Scholastics: The Guilty Pleasures of the Middle English Floris and Blauncheflour by Patricia Clare Ingham Part II: Dramatic Forms 4. Delivery Rooms: Towards a Reconsideration of the Conclusion of The Tempest by Heather Dubrow 5. One Head is Better than Two: The Aphoristic Afterlife of Renaissance Tragedy by Frances E. Dolan 6. About Suffering, and on Dying: Shakespeare’s Re-invention of a Theater of Eschatological Identity in King Lear by James Nohrnberg Part III: Travel and Geography 7. Dante, Michelangelo, and What We Talk about When We Talk about Poetry by Leonard Barkan 8. The Pleasures of the Land in Restoration England: The Social Politics of The Compleat Angler by Andrew McRae Part IV: The Literary Career 9. Rival Laureates and Multiple Monuments: Collaborative Self-Crowning in France by Edwin M. Duval 10. Du Bellay’s “Source de La Meduse” by Margaret Ferguson 11. The Jacobean Prodigals by Michael O’Connell 12. Religious Affiliation in Elizabethan London: Richard Mulcaster, Edmund Spenser, and The Family of Love by Andrew Hadfield Afterword: Helgersonland by Patricia Fumerton Richard Helgerson: A Bibliography About the Contributors

About the Author :
Roze Hentschell is associate professor of English at Colorado State University. Kathy Lavezzo is associate professor of English at the University of Iowa.