Richard Barnfield’s Poetics: Early Modern English Poetry Beyond Shakespeare

Written by an international group of scholars making use of different approaches, this edited collection is the first to take into account the entire corpus of the early modern English poet Richard Barnfield and tackles several crucial issues for the in-depth understanding of his literary output. The homoeroticism of Barnfield’s poetry, the specific focus of some of the chapters included here, is explored from new and challenging perspectives, which bring forward a critical discussion that has been acquiring growing importance while also underscoring the multifaceted intersections between this specific aspect of Barnfield’s poetics and other elements of his production. At the same time, other relevant issues are given the attention they deserve, including matters of intertextuality and interdiscursivity, the poet’s relationship with his (re)sources, his engagement with different poetic genres, the way in which he relates to a series of contemporary discourses, such as those of patronage and law, and considerations on his linguistic and stylistic achievements. By taking into account the entirety of Barnfield’s corpus, and by doing so from a variety of different angles, this volume thus aims to enhance our understanding not only of a poet who was considered one of Shakespeare’s most talented contemporaries in the early modern age but also of the English poetic panorama at large between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.