| FA-52361-06 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | William Kuskin | Recursive Origins: Textual Culture, Historical Transition, and the Rise of Modernity | 7/1/2007 - 6/30/2008 | $40,000.00 | William | | Kuskin | | | | Regents of the University of Colorado, Boulder | Hattiesburg | MS | 39406-0001 | USA | 2005 | Literature, General | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 40000 | 0 | 40000 | 0 |
It is a commonplace assumption that modernity comes late to England. This argument assumes that humanism and the Reformation create a sudden break for English history. "Recursive Origins" proposes a model of historical transition based in the continual engagement with the presence of the past. Rather than discovering an insular England fundamentally transformed by modernity, it suggests that fifteenth-century writers such as Lydgate, Malory, and Caxton developed a complex skepticism about textual culture inclusive of secular and religious authority, and profoundly influential to their strongest readers, Spenser and Shakespeare. Reading and writing: the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries exist in a circuit of cultural production. |