Memory and Intertextuality in Renaissance Literature

This book uses theories of memory derived from cognitive science to offer new ways of understanding how literary works remember other literary works.

Raphael Lyne (Author)

9781107443907, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 January 2019

270 pages, 3 b/w illus.
23 x 15 x 1.5 cm, 0.4 kg

'Lyne approaches memory as an elastic metaphor. Early modern memory culture adheres to no single model of memory; neither does Lyne's argument … by directly addressing specific sets of questions in cognitive science, Lyne provides a robust and humanistic response, an intertext as it were, to ongoing social-scientific research in memory … in terms of its contribution to literary theory, this is the strongest work on early modern memory that I have read.' Lina Perkins Wilder, Connecticut College

This book uses theories of memory derived from cognitive science to offer new ways of understanding how literary works remember other literary works. Using terms derived from psychology – implicit and explicit memory, interference and forgetting – Raphael Lyne shows how works by Renaissance writers such as Wyatt, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton interact with their sources. The poems and plays in question are themselves sources of insight into the workings of memory, sharing and anticipating some scientific categories in the process of their thinking. Lyne proposes a way forward for cognitive approaches to literature, in which both experiments and texts are valued as contributors to interdisciplinary questions. His book will interest researchers and upper-level students of renaissance literature and drama, Shakespeare studies, memory studies, and classical reception.

1. Introduction
Part I. Implicit and Explicit Poetic Memory: 2. Defining the implicit and explicit poetic memories
3. Discovered purposes: Jonson and Milton
4. Moving between sources: Ovid and Erasmus in Shakespeare's Sonnets
Part II. Intertextuality, Forgetting and the Schema: 5. Schema and fragment
6. Wyatt and Petrarch
7. Plutarch and Antony and Cleopatra
8. Jonson's Catiline
9. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Memory [JMRM], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary theory [DSA]