Shakespeare and the Composite Text
Douglas S. Bruster · Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks · 2003
E arlier I maintained that a thin description of early modern literature could well begin by pointing out the intensively personal nature of that era’s texts. In addition to this emphasis on the personal, literary works of the early modern period in England tend to be unusually copious—thick, that is, with “stuff,” including quotations of other texts, as well as descriptions of and references to material from the world outside their pages. 1 Such copia often has attracted the attention of critics interested in the cultural contexts of early modern literature. As was observed in chapter 2, however, the literary and social materials of various texts are typically important, in these critical modes, not as sources of the texts in question but rather as potential sources for critical thick descriptions thereof I maintained there that these descriptions have become almost a separate literary genre in their own right. Obviously, the field has benefited a great deal from the cultural turn in literary study and from the thick descriptions that have accompanied this turn. But one of the things that get left out by thick description’s interest in literary contexts is the relationship between newer forms of criticism—criticism usefully gathered by the coinage “cultural historicism” 2 —and an older kind of formalist criticism that served as an unspoken, and perhaps unconscious, model for it: source study. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.