Confession and Memory in Early Modern English Literature

This is the first study to consider the relationship between private confessional rituals and memory across a range of early modern writers, including Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Robert Southwell.

Autorentext

Paul D. Stegner is Associate Professor of English at California Polytechnic State University, USA. His essays have appeared in Shakespeare Studies, Studies in Philology, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, and several edited collections, including The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements 1. Confession and Memory in the Age of Reformations 2. Confession and Redemptive Forgetting in Spenser's Legend of Holiness: Memories of Sin, Memories of Salvation 3. The Will to Forget: Ovidian Heroism and the Compulsion to Confess in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus 4. 'Try what repentance can': Hamlet, Confession, and the Extraction of Interiority 5. Will and the Reconciled Maid: Rereading Confession and Remembering Sin in Shakespeares Sonnets 6. Treasonous Reconciliations: Robert Southwell, Religious Polemic, and the Criminalization of Confession Conclusion: Memories of Confession in Seventeenth-Century England Notes Bibliography Index