Robert C. Evans /
Representative Reviews and Citations:
[PAGE 1: citations
1-750; PAGE 2: citations 751-1400+]
Evans has been a named professor at Auburn University-Montgomery,
where he has won numerous teaching awards, specialized in the early modern
period, and published more than thirty books, including several important ones
on Jonson. – D. Heywood Brock, Ben Jonson Encyclopedia (2016),
p. 167.
Ben Jonson and the poetics of patronage /
Robert C. Evans.
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Lewisburg
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Choice Review
An excellent study of Ben Jonson's involvement in the patronage
system of the English Renaissance. Reflecting the outlook of the new
historicism, which highlights the sociopolitical pressures on literary culture,
this analysis emphasizes the poetry while surveying the masques and plays.
Jonson's art is perceived as the means to advance his career, so that the
desire to succeed and the quest for power become dominant goals. In line with
this perspective, the audience for Jonson's poetry includes actual and
potential patrons, for whose favor the author vied against other writers.
Related to the analysis of Jonson's works is a psychological interpretation of
his personality, afflicted by uncertainty, insecurity, and anxiety that
resulted from the competition in the patronage system. This view of Jonson's
personality complements the recent full-scale biography by David Riggs, Ben
Jonson: A Life (CH, May '89). Highly recommended for advanced undergraduates
and graduate students. -A. C. Labriola, Duquesne University
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Robert C. Evans's new
book is an exemplary product of the last decade's attempt to
recontextualize and rehistoricize Renaissance studies. Influenced by the work
of Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Helgerson, Stephen Orgel, and Leah Marcus
-- all of whom have helped chart the intersection of politics and poetry
in the Renaissance and informed by the findings of social scientists and
historians, Evans has written a study at once syncretic and strikingly
original. Distinguished by thorough scholarship and admirable attention to
nuance and detail, Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage provides
both the most complete and accessible introduction to the Elizabethan and Stuart
patronage system and the fullest consideration of its profound and various
impact on Jonson and his work yet attempted.
. . . Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage is an
important contribution to the current project of rehistoricizing Renaissance
literature. It provides an excellent introduction to a crucial context for the
study of Tudor and Stuart literature, especially works connected with the
court. It is also one of the best studies of Jonson's poetry ever undertaken,
illuminating not only the texts most obviously implicated in the patronage
system but even those -- such as the acclaimed epitaph on his son -- apparently
most remote from careerist considerations. Many of the readings of individual
poems are open to quibbles and questions, and one may justly complain that the
chapter on the plays is too spotty and compressed, but certainly the central
contention that questions of power are everywhere embedded in Jonson's texts is
cogently argued and persuasively demonstrated. Ben Jonson and the
Poetics of Patronage is written with unusual clarity and grace; it
deserves a large and appreciative readership - Claude J. Summers, South
Central Review
+++++
Evans develops the key Renaissance concept of 'patronage', which
has been so central to recent historical 'revisions' of the period, extending
it beyond limited notions of payment, personal negotiation and factional
allegiance to a pervasive condition of consciousness in the social structure of
the day . . . .[His book] opens up some extremely suggestive perspectives
on the self-images that pepper Jonson's works . . . . It is an approach which
one could imagine fruitfully applied to Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse, as
well as to contemporaries like Spenser, Donne, and Herbert: any context, in
effect, where the writing is aimed at semi-permanent authorial
self-presentation, either in coterie circulation or print, which of course
includes Jonson's surviving plays. - Richard Dutton, Shakespeare
Survey
+++++
Robert C. Evans’s erudite study of Jonson as a “patronage poet”
begins by outlining a useful theory of patronage in the Renaissance. . . . This
approach is most effective in the chapters dealing with “Poems for Patrons,”
“Poems on Rivals and Rivalry,” and “Poems on Friends and Friendship” and in the
readings of poems that were directed to specific aristocratic patrons. . . .
Patronage as a psychological system that manifests itself in the ceaseless
production of “micropolitical messages is skillfully demonstrated in poems
written for patrons such as the Earl of Pembroke, Robert Cecil, Francis Bacon,
or James I. . . . [The book] provides a helpful account of how Jonson’s
relations with his patrons affected the tone and content of his poetry.
Furthermore, it is a meticulously researched and carefully documented study.
Evans’ descriptions of complex aristocratic genealogies and sudden factional
shifts bring clarity and color to what can be a confusing and tedious aspect of
patronage. – Daniel J. Vitkus, Shakespeare Bulletin
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Ultimately, in adopting an overtly psychological approach to
Jonson's poetry, this study succeeds in delineating the essentially
irreconcilable tension between poetic ideals and social realities which lies at
the heart of Jonson's most memorable panegyrics. . . . Evans's balanced and
defining analysis of the broad spectrum of power, self-advancement, reward,
disappointment, and despair encompassed by the term "literary
patronage" offers a useful contribution to the current critical
fascination with the inner turmoils of Jonson's poetic creativity. - Michael G.
Brennan, Notes and Queries
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To say that an author's preface is the best part of his
book would normally be to say that the rest of the book is
less than valuable; however, in the case of Robert C. Evans's Ben
Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage, the preface so illuminates the rest of
an excellent book that I really must call it the best part. What Evans sets out
to do here is to reevaluate the concept of patronage itself , wresting it from
the new historicists' sole focus on economics and macropolitics and placing it
rather within a network of Renaissance hierarchical
relationships in general, with an emphasis on the
individual's place in the network. Such a network of patrons,
colleagues, rivals, relatives, and friends, according to Evans, would become
almost subliminally enmeshed in whatever a Renaissance author wrote, especially
in the case of Ben Jonson , whose work was so overridingly public and
whose ambivalance about his own life was so inadequately
private. . . . The book contains a wealth of factual information on Jonson and
his society, examines Renaissance and modern critical statements with a keen
eye, and gives useful new readings of poems that I had thought
'done to death' before seeing them revived here. Above
all, the book is a pleasure to read. In these latter days of
heavily jargoned work meant For Scholars Only, it is good to find a book that
one can recommend even to a non-academic who enjoys poetry and ideas. It is quite
evident that Evans still enjoys them and wants his readers to do so as well. -
Phoebe Spinrad (Ohio State), Literature & History
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Ben Jonson and the
Poetics of Patronage goes right to the
heart of the era's social organization and does much to explain the power
of patronage, the self-promotion and assumed hauteur of some authors, the
subtle ways in which obligations and rivalries were created and managed.
Moreover, the author is acutely alert to the artistic values of the works
he is discussing and more than a little concerned with getting under the
facade that Jonson put up; Evans is ready, willing and able to plumb the
depths of that both crusty and layered personality. . . . This is a book
you will find yourself appreciating more and more as you mull over its
sensitive scholarship. - Leonard R.N. Ashley, Bibliothèque d'Humanisme
et Renaissance
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The strength of Evans'
book is his reading, which is both extensive and intensive. He has firm
control of the work that has been done both on power relationships and on
Jonson's poetry; his readings of particular poems are well-written
analyses of texts and contexts. Inevitably in a study of this sort there
is a tendency to reduction: after a while the reader has difficulty distinguishing
one patronage poem analysis from any other. Yet the sometimes overwhelming
thoroughness of Evans' approach is more strength than weakness. Generally
the book supplies an intelligent and lucid analysis of the poetics of
patronage. Although its focus is Jonson, its method could well be extended
to include other Renaissance writers. - Frances Teague, Comparative
Drama
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This critical work presents Jonson's role as poet within the existing patronage system of the age. The work examines Jonson's social position and power within the rigidly hierarchical society of the day. . . .The subject, while suggesting many interesting reflections about Jonson's life and works, is carefully limited. To my knowledge there is no existing comparable work that treats the question of patronage in Jonson's poetics as thoroughly as this one. . . . Those who admire Ben Jonson - the doughty warrior who fought the good fight - will find in this well written account of the micropolitical truths of the work-a-day world of Jonson's age, or our own, a work to be profitably added to one's critical library on this superb poet. - Ted Couillard, The Sixteenth-Century Journal
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Evans's book delivers a Jonson who is both a great artist and a complex human being. It is thoroughly well informed and clearly written; and it has the additional merit of making a case for some neglected texts. - George Parfitt, Yearbook of English Studies
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Reads Jonson's poetry and some plays within the context of the period's elaborate patronage system. Important. - Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, Ben Jonson Revised
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Habits of mind : evidence and effects of Ben Jonson's reading /
[included in Best Books for Academic Libraries, 2002]
Robert C. Evans.
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Choice Review
This study reports and interprets Jonson's markings (asterisks,
brackets, diagonal and curved lines, underlinings, and other such indicators)
in selected but diverse books: the philosophical writings of Seneca, works by
Apuleius, poems by Chaucer, and the Latin version of Thomas More's History of
King Richard III. Also, Evans (Auburn Univ.) considers Jonson's markings of
Clement Edmondes's responses to autobiographical writings by Julius Caesar and
provides illustrative (not comprehensive) discussion of some of the markings in
Scripture. Such primary evidence of Jonson's interests casts light in various
ways on the relationship between reading and creativity. Despite the range of
his reading (the disparate eras, cultures, and authors; the numerous genres;
the countless thematic emphases), Jonson established certain patterns by his
markings. Evans creates a topical index of inestimable value both for
understanding the works of Jonson and their relationship to his reading and for
interpreting the works of Jonson's contemporaries. Highly recommended for
upper-division undergraduates and above. A. C. Labriola; Duquesne University
+++++
In Habits of Mind, Robert C. Evans has written the
kind of careful, scholarly treatment of Ben Jonson that we have come to expect
from him. Here he has returned to analyses of some of Jonson's marginalia in
books from his own library . . . . In addition to thorough descriptions of the
various books that he considers, Evans provides a very useful topical index, in
which he aims (successfully) to show how "many of the same themes and
concerns that seem to have been central to [Jonson's] own writing seem also to
have been central to his reading" (13). We can be grateful to Evans not
only for making available a good deal of useful information, but also - nearly
a wonder these days - for making it available in prose that is lucid
throughout. (James A. Riddell, Renaissance Quarterly)
+++++
Professor Evans's stated purpose in Habits of Mind is at first glance a decidedly modest one. Noting that a careful examination of the marked passages in Jonson's books allows readers "to speak with some confidence about the interior mental life of one of the most important and influential writers of the English Renaissance," Evans suggests that the description of Jonson's annotations and marginalia in a representative selection of volumes will be of particular use to scholars of Jonson's work. . . . The larger implications of Evans's study, however, soon become clear. Habits of Mind can to some extent be read as a defense and a vindication of the sincerity with which Jonson maintained the humanist assumptions which guided him throughout his career as a writer. . . . Connecting the hard evidence of Jonson's reading to the larger issues which motivated his artistic development, Evans's study not only further elucidates what other scholars (most notably Katherine Eisaman Maus) have characterized as Jonson's constant and continued debt to classical "habits of mind" but likewise sheds light on the complicated cluster of anxieties --the anxieties contingent on the threats of parody, of plagiarism, and of the malicious exposure of intellectual and aesthetic indebtedness -- that likewise fueled the playwright's professional development. - Robert Mack, The Sixteenth-Century Journal
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. . . a valuable tool for students of Jonson. . . . Evans provides an absorbing, close study of how Jonson read . . . . a richly detailed study of Jonson's commendatory verses . . . . we as readers become more aware of the extent of Jonson's reading, as we track him everywhere in [previous writers'] snow. Evans is to be congratulated for mapping these movements so minutely and thoughtfully." - Helen Ostovich, Ben Jonson Journal
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This year also saw the publication of another monograph by the enviably productive Robert C. Evans: Habits of Mind: Evidence and Effects of Ben Jonson's Reading. This is a dense and scholarly account of the significance of Jonson's markings and marginalia in those books from his extensive personal collection which remain extant Evans elects to concentrate on Jonson's engagement with literary sources and precursors. . . . - Year's Work in English Studies, 1998
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Two critical studies also serve Jonson well: Robert C.
Evans’s Habits of Mind: Evidence and Effects of Ben Jonson’s Reading .
. . and A. W. Johnson’s Ben Jonson: Poetry and Architecture .
. . . Evans has already shown himself a good “old” historicist reader of Jonson
(see English Studies, 77/1, p. 79), and here he examines Jonson’s
marginalia in the books he himself read. Pace the scruples of
Katharine Maus, Evans is confident that we can know, through this medium, what
was going on in Jonson’s mind. He is alert to the hazards of interpreting
markings which are rarely verbal and can seldom (unless they are underlinings)
be related to a specific bit of text; but he weighs the evidence sanely and
persuasively. . . . – Paul Dean, English Studies, 78.1 (1997)
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In Habits of Mind: Evidence and Effects of Ben Jonson’s Reading (1995), Evans analyzes handwritten marks and marginal notes that Jonson made in books, including material evidence of how Jonson read his copies of the Bible, the philosophical writings of Seneca, two works by Apuleius, the 1602 edition of Chaucer’s works, and the Latin version of Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard III. Evans provides appendices at the end of each chapter itemizing the poet’s annotations, and includes facsimiles of some heavily marked pages and a useful topical index. - Douglas Brooks, English Literary Renaissance
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Jonson and the contexts of his time / [included in Best
Books for Academic Libraries, 2002]
Robert C. Evans.
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Literature and history - England - History - 17th century. | Littérature et histoire - Angleterre - Histoire - 17e siècle. | Zeitgenossen. | Jonson,
Ben, 1573?-1637 - Criticism and interpretation. | Jonson,
Ben, 1573?-1637 - Contemporary England.| Jonson,
Ben, 1573?-1637 - Critique et interprétation. | Jonson,
Ben, 1573?-1637- Et l'Angleterre. | Jonson,
Ben.
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Related Information:
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Choice Review
The industrious Ben Jonson scholar Robert Evans here gathers
essays of two kinds. The papers in the middle of the volume explore topical
meaning in Jonson's plays; the interest is not in large political or religious
position-taking but in what Evans calls "micropolitics"--personal
concerns often focused on literary rivalries. Typically, Evans takes some
connection that has been noticed briefly in the prior Jonson literature and
tightens the connection with further reading in period sources, including
manuscript materials. For example, one essay adduces additional evidence that
17th-century readers were prepared to identify the character Volpone with a
celebrated and much-resented rich fellow of the day named Thomas Sutton. These
papers do not change one's view of the plays in question but will benefit
advanced researchers. More attractive to nonspecialists will be the studies
that begin and end the collection; here Evans provides aesthetically
penetrating appreciations along with biographical contextualizations in his
readings of several poems Jonson wrote to high-ranking patrons. Recommended for
graduate collections especially. E. D. Hill; Mount Holyoke College
+++++
Robert Evans has done much valuable digging around in the
archives, and he considers afresh some intriguing connections and contexts that
recent scholarship has by and large passed over. . . . Two chapters in
particular involve newly recovered sources. The most important is a detailed
investigation into the case of Thomas Sutton [d. 1611] . . . as the possible
model for [Jonson's] Volpone. . . .Evans reconstructs the development of
[Sutton's] posthumous reputation more fully than in any previous study. . . .
The other entirely new material is a long consideration of Joseph Webbe, the
educational theorist [who shared his ideas with Jonson]. Evans is the first
writer to supply a full account of Webbe's unpublished manuscript . . . .
[Additionally,] in the light of [Evans's] discussion The Devil Is
an Ass emerges as one of Jonson's most densely allusive pieces . . . .
Evans's microscopic scrutiny of detail . . . throws down a challenge to
bolder, simplifying narratives . . . . Professor Evans has valuably advanced
the process by which Jonson is being returned to history, and we are much
indebted to him for reactivating so much material that was formerly inert. -
Martin Butler, Ben Jonson Journal
+++++
. . . The eight diverse essays that comprise Evans's study make
it somewhat less unified than his three other recent books on Jonson, but they
do serve to illustrate his claim that, paradoxically, the more fully we
appreciate how Jonson's works are rooted in their own time, the more fully we
may appreciate their artistry (p. 94). The paradoxical quality of Jonson's art
and life, in fact, is a recurring theme in the book. Evans finds paradoxes in
the way that Jonson's exaltation of his freedom of response in the
"Epistle to Sacvile" signals his submission to social mores, in the
fact that The Devil Is an Ass (by supporting the positions of
the Earl of Pembroke) is itself a product of the courtly infighting that it
satirizes, and in the potency of poetic skill demonstrated by Jonson's
effective dramatization of his physical weakness in his "Epistle Mendicant"
to Lord Weston. Refusing to judge these seeming contradictions, Evans views
them as the basis of Jonson's continuing interest as a complicated artist and
man. - W. David Kay, Journal of English and Germanic Philology
+++++
This is a rich and thoughtful book which addresses the personal and political contexts of some of Jonson's works. It is mainly concerned with some of the plays and masques, but there is also comment upon specific individual poems, following the precedent of Evans' earlier study, Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage (1989). . . . It is a pleasure to reflect upon this useful contribution to Jonson studies both in terms of the detailed discussion of individual works and the more general speculation about the function of this kind of historical study. Even if one cannot always agree with Evans there is no doubting his scholarship and the thoughtfulness of his approach. - Peter Happé, Comparative Drama
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Robert Evans is certainly among the most prolific Jonson scholars of the past decade, and maybe ever. In six years he has published three books on the poet, and the biographical note to the latest of these volumes adds, in passing, that he has also completed a fourth. We who lack Evans's scholarly fecundity may regard all this as vulgar ostentation, but it is getting harder and harder to ignore, particularly since the completion of one of Evans's books seems automatically to generate material for another one. That is very much the case with the latest offering. Jonson and the Contexts of his Time works in large part as a sequel to the earlier Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage, in which Evans conducted a lengthy and insightful study of what he calls the "micropolitical" dimension of Jonson's nondramatic verse. . . . This material is important in its own right as a contribution to Jonson biography, even if one disagrees with Evans's overall picture of the poet and his work. As for that overall picture: Evans characterizes it in an introductory chapter as broadly new historicist, while observing that the new historicism itself has rapidly developed into a category without an adequate referent. Certainly Evans's interest in the biographical particulars of Jonson's achievement serves to associate his work with current historicizing literary scholarship. But it also produces a criticism that is really sui generis: refreshing historicist scholarship that eschews the usual Foucaultian mysticism about power, and that concentrates instead upon deeds and language such as men do use. To this extent it is work that Jonson himself, I believe, would have appreciated. - Bruce Boehrer, South Atlantic Review
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In Robert Evans' third book since 1989 on Ben Jonson, he offers his readers a miscellany of historical contexts. Much of Jonson and the Contexts of His Time presents "new archival evidence" (xiii) bearing on various of Jonson's plays, masques, or poems, or builds on - and in certain instances recycles - scholarship now remote but still valuable to our understanding more fully Jonson's reception of and by his contemporaries. The conservative kind of historicism Evans practices here owes far more to the archival pursuits of a G.E. Bentley than to the new historicism with which his work has been bracketed in reviews of his companion study, Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage. At its best, Evans' discoveries extend Bentley's and D.H. Craig's important work of historical retrieval and collection, including the documenting of previously unpublished allusions to Jonson. His latest book also augments our still-scanty knowledge of Jonson's relations to key patrons in his Caroline years, among them Newcastle, Weston, and Digby. - Jennifer Brady, Renaissance Quarterly
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With great attention to archival data [Evans] continues to argue that Jonson becomes more meaningful in both an artistic and an historical sense when examined in the context of the political, social, and literary milieu of the day. . . By addressing and dispelling the possible misreadings of his arguments, Evans smartly distances himself from those “new historians” who are only too quick to draw broad conclusions from specific details. . . . The worth of Evans’ text lies in his discussion of archival research. He makes a brilliant case for Archibald Campbell, the Earl of Argyll, as the prototype of Jonson’s “Duke of Drowned Land.” Relying on rather arcane sources, Evans sketches a convincing argument steeped in the anti-Scottish climate of 1616 and Jonson’s solid relationship with James I. . . . Jonson and his rivals’ respective poetic aesthetics are clearly and persuasively argued by Evans. . . . By closely examining several of Jonson’s late poems, Evans shows us a man still willing to weigh his position against his patrons’ with a remarkable, even irrepressible, frankness. . . . [Evans] is successful at doing what so many other Jonson scholars are not: bringing the historical contexts of Jonson’s writing to the foreground of literary inquiry. – Kathleen E. Marley, Seventeenth-Century News
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This book is a collection of discrete essays linked by a concern to relate various works by Ben Jonson to specific aspects of the historical context of their original composition and reception. Predominant features of these investigations are the workings of the system of patronage, rivalry, and competition between Jonson and other writers, and the identification of personal and topical allusions. Robert C. Evans often cites detailed historical evidence at some length, giving the reader a basis on which to judge how persuasive are the particular connections and arguments he makes. – Nick Rowe, Modern Language Review
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[In] Jonson and the Contexts of His Time . . .
Robert C. Evans . . . presents the author enmeshed in contradictory, even
incompatible, relationships with his public, rivals and patrons (there are some
excellent close readings of poems addressed to this last group). Evans
practices urbane historical criticism of a broadly traditional kind . . . . –
Paul Dean, English Studies, 77.1 (1996)
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Robert C. Evans (Auburn)
has published a careful survey of Jonson and the Contexts of His Time.
. . . “Wise Jonson's talent in observing lay.” In this book we observe him in
his milieu.- Leonard R.N. Ashley, Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et
Renaissance
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"Three of the most
interesting studies [of Volpone] come from Stephen Greenblatt,
Robert C. Evans [in Jonson and the Contexts of His Time], and
Richard Dutton. . . . Evans mounts a persuasive case that there is a
connection between Volpone and [Thomas] Sutton. . . . After reading Evans' analysis,
it is difficult to reject the possibility that Volpone is
either a satire of Sutton or that it would at least have been perceived as such
by many in Jacobean England."
Marshall Botvinick, Jonson:
Volpone (Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 124-25.
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Evans, Jonson and the Contexts of His Time (1994), focuses on the “micropolitical aspects” of Jonson’s writings—i.e., the poet’s own personal dealings with patrons, rivals, and friends—to characterize more fully his position within early seventeenth-century theater, literary, and court culture. - Douglas Brooks, English Literary Renaissance
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Jonson, Lipsius, and the Politics of Renaissance Stoicism
Robert C. Evans
Longwood Academic, 1992
- Political science - 354 pages
Anticipating current scholarly interest in early modern reading practices and book history, Robert C. Evans, [in] Jonson, Lipsius and the Politics of Renaissance Stoicism (1992), analyzes the handwritten marks and marginal notes Jonson made in his copy of Justis Lipsius’ Six Books of Politics or Civil Doctrine (a facsimile of which is included as an appendix to the book) to show how Jonson read the influential Flemish intellectual’s writings and to elucidate the development of Jonson’s thinking about politics and appropriate political conduct. - Douglas Brooks, English Literary Renaissance
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Ben
Jonson's major plays : summaries of modern monographs /
Robert C. Evans, compiler and general editor ; Kimberly Barron ...
[et al.], editorial team.
Here is a book that
every Jonson scholar should own. Every student (even an undergraduate) writing
a paper on Jonson's plays should consult it, and that means every library (even
those more strapped for cash than usual) should own it. . . . The word
"major" in the title of this book is misleading, however, since all of
the complete plays wholly by Jonson are covered. Also remarkably complete is
the list of monographs summarized. . . . I cannot think of any that are
omitted. The whole scholarly enterprise . . . would be virtually impossible
without such tools, and we should give great respect to those that are done
well like this one. - David McPherson, Ben Jonson Journal
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Ben Jonson’s Major Plays: Summaries of Modern Monographs (2000), comp. and ed. Robert C. Evans, provides a synopsis of each of Jonson’s seventeen major plays, followed by summaries of scholarly arguments about a given play from nearly all English language book-length studies of Jonson written between 1886 and 1999. It includes an index of Topics and Themes, prepared by Kimberly Barron, that indicates which monographs discuss a given topic or theme and the context of plays that are discussed. - Douglas Brooks, English Literary Renaissance
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Short
fiction : a critical companion /
by Robert C. Evans, Anne C. Little, and Barbara Wiedemann.
[included in Best Books for Academic Libraries,
2002]
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West
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Choice Review
This is a useful compendium of reviews of classic short stories,
stories that are a staple of introductory literature courses in high school and
college classrooms. From Ann Beattie to Eudora Welty, and including Faulkner,
Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Joyce, Melville, Poe, and others, the stories
are presented through their commentaries in scholarly journals and contemporary
periodicals. The volume is introduced by its editors, who present an extended
glossary of some of the traditional and current critical approaches to
narrative, such as thematic, formalist, psychoanalytic, archetypal, Marxist,
structuralist, feminist, deconstruction, reader-response, new historicist,
multicultural, and postmodern. The reviews that make up the volume are
correlated to these critical synopses, and together provide a helpful aid for
teachers and students. Recommended for general and college libraries. B.
Harlow; University of Texas at Austin
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Compiled
by Robert C. Evans, Anne C. Little and Barbara Wiedemann, Short
Fiction: A Critical Companion provides students and teachers alike
with a useful introductory guide to the short story. The compilers have
assembled critical responses to forty of literature's most renowned works of
short fiction. - Year's Work in English Studies
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My name was Martha : a Renaissance woman's autobiographical poem
/ [included in Best Books for Academic Libraries, 2002]
by Martha Moulsworth ; edited with commentary by Robert C. Evans
and Barbara Wiedemann.
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West
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Choice Review
Martha Moulsworth's 1632 poem, "Memorandum," recently
discovered in a commonplace book in Yale University's Beinecke Library, is
printed here for the first time. Written by a 55-year-old woman who chronicles
her life in 55 couplets, it is one of the earliest examples of autobiographical
poetry. The poet also makes a remarkably progressive claim for equal rights to
education for women ("two Vniversities we haue of men/ o thatt we had but
one of women then"). The thrice-widowed Moulsworth creates a self-portrait
that reveals her indebtdness to her clergyman father, who saw to it she was
educated, and her enjoyment of all three husbands, especially the third with
whom she "led an easie darlings life," exercising her "will in
house, in purse in Store ...." The editors, both of whom teach at Auburn
University, provide a close reading of the poem, pointing out its complex
mixture of tones, and place the poem in its historical context, considering its
identity as autobiography and as feminist discourse. An important discovery for
Renaissance scholars, the book is also accessible to general readers. Highly
recommended. Undergraduate; graduate; faculty. J. P. Baumgaertner; Wheaton
College (IL)
+++++
With
this book, Robert Evans and Barbara Wiedemann provide the welcome first
printing of Martha Moulsworth's 1632 autobiographical poem - recently unearthed
at Yale's Beinecke Library and entitled "The Memorandum of Martha
Moulsworth / Widdowe" - followed by several chapters analyzing the poem
from literary, historicist, and feminist perspectives. The editors' stated
threefold goal is to make the poem widely available, to establish the poem's
artistry, and to begin to place the poem in the contexts of other autobiographical
pieces and other writings by early modern women. . . . Though there is no final
attempt to synthesize the "old-fashioned," formalist analysis of the
poem with the historicist and feminist analyses, this lack of synthesis seems intentional
and may in fact present greater accessibility for the general reader or for
students with various interests in Moulsworth's poem. -- Lori Schroeder
Haslem, Renaissance Quarterly
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"The Muses females are" : Martha Moulsworth and other
women writers of the English Renaissance /
edited by Robert C. Evans and Anne C. Little.
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West
Cornwall, CT : Locust Hill Press, 1995.
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English literature - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History and criticism. | English literature- Women authors - History and criticism. | Autobiography - Women authors. | Sex role in literature. | Renaissance - England. | Women and literature - England - History - 17th century. | Moulsworth, Martha - Criticism and interpretation. | Moulsworth, Martha - Contemporaries.
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Choice Review
This collection of short essays offers valuable explorations of
Martha Moulsworth's recently discovered poem "Memorandum" (appearing
for the first time in Moulsworth's "My Name Was Martha": A
Renaissance Woman's Autobiographical Poem, CH, Mar'94), including newly
uncovered details about the author's life that sometimes provocatively
contradict the persona she created. The authors--Germaine Greer, Anthony Low,
John Shawcross, and Frances Teague, among others--take diverse approaches to
the poem, investigating, for example, its biblical resonance, its viability as
an early poetic expression of mutual love in marriage, its punning marginalia,
and its place in the genre of 17th-century autobiographical works by women. The
appendix includes an edited text of the poem, photographic reproductions of the
handwritten text discovered in the Beinecke, transcripts of the wills of
Moulsworth and her three husbands, the funeral sermon for Moulsworth, and a
helpful chronology of women writers of the English Renaissance. This engaging,
meticulously reconstructed biography results from historical detective work and
careful attention to, analysis of, and contextualization of a hitherto
unexplored poem by a newly discovered author. Highly recommended for all
collections. J. P. Baumgaertner; Wheaton College (IL)
+++++
With "The Muses Female Are," Robert
C. Evans and Anne C. Little follow up on the earlier "My Name Was
Martha": A Renaissance Woman's Autobiographical Poem. I should
disclose that I am a contributor. That said, I shall go out on a limb and
propose what no one has quite dared say: that "The Memorandum of Martha
Moulsworth, Widdowe" may be the best short poem in English by a woman
between 1500 and 1660. I hope it will be widely anthologized. Since it was only
recently discovered, the two books co-edited by Evans contain nearly everything
we have on it. . . . "The Birthday of My Self," a
well-edited collection of student essays and comments edited by Ann
Depas-Orange and Evans, confirms how strongly students and common readers
respond to her moving poem. - Anthony Low, Studies in English
Literature
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Frank O'Connor : new perspectives /
edited by Robert C. Evans and Richard Harp.
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West
Cornwall, CT : Locust Hill Press, 1998.
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Choice Review
In their sensible introduction, Evans and Harp state that their
purpose is to revive flagging interest in O'Connor. They divide the study into
six sections: "Contents," which contains four items and features a
lengthy interview with O'Connor's wife; "The Stories: Themes and
Techniques," seven essays on such matters as narrative voice, woman's
voice, "the serious side"; "Comparison and Contrast," four
essays bringing in other authors; "Critical Kaleidoscope," O'Connor's
criticism paraphrased by a number of O'Connor scholars and close readings that
offer brief analyses of two of O'Connor's short stories, "Lady
Brenda" and "Guests of the Nation," by approximately 50 critics;
"Some Final Words," featuring the radio script of one of "O'Connor's
most famous stories, "Guests of the Nation"; "Facts and
Figures," a chronology and a bibliography of works by and about O'Connor.
The editors balance O'Connor scholarship by offering not only an exhaustive
compendium of scholarship but also subtly indicating possible directions for
further study of this great Irish writer. This imaginative effort is unlike any
other treatment of O'Connor and should certainly attain its goal. This reviewer
had fun reading it. A good choice for all undergraduate collections. F. L.
Ryan; Stonehill College
+++++
Robert
C. Evans and Katie Magaw's "Irony and Paradox in Frank O'Connor's
Style" is a perceptive stylistic analysis of O'Connor's penchant for
wittily expressing the complexities, contradictions and ironies in characters.
The essay demonstrates how O'Connor's narrators will, within the space of a
sentence or two, "switch, suddenly and unexpectedly, from one tone or
implication to its opposite," as in this example drawn from "The Ugly
Duckling" (a slash mark notes each shift): "she had practically lost
her mother's regard / by inheriting her father's looks. / Her ugliness indeed /
was quite endearing." Such an analysis goes far in making the case that
O'Connor is a far richer and complex writer than he is frequently given credit
for being. - Michael Storey, Studies in Short Fiction
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Kate
Chopin's short fiction : a critical companion
Robert C. Evans, compiler and general editor.
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West
Cornwall, CT : Locust Hill Press, c2001.
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Chopin scholarship gets a boost from a sourcebook to the
short fiction, a new biography, and the reissuing of her first novel. Robert C.
Evans’s Kate Chopin’s Short Fiction: A Critical Companion (Locust
Hill) presents critical commentary on Chopin’s short fiction in a chronological
sequence. Clearly, some stories have received considerably more scholarly
attention. Evans highlights a tradition within the scholarship for each story
that makes it possible to see how shifting theoretical emphases affect the
reading of individual stories. The appendix with student responses to the
stories is interesting, though it will be more useful (perhaps) to students
seeking guidance reading Chopin than to scholars. -- Michael J. Kiskis, American
Literary Scholarship, 2001
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
A
companion to Brian Friel /
edited by Richard Harp and Robert C. Evans.
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West
Cornwall, CT : Locust Hill Press, c2002.
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Choice Review
Harp
(Univ. of Nevada) and Evans (Auburn Univ.) offer a volume that parallels
Friel's varied contributions to the literary world and offers approaches to
teaching his major works. Because the bulk of Friel's output is drama, the
editors appropriately devote ten of the 18 essays to his plays. These
treatments look at the playwright's major themes, his adaptations of Russian
texts, film adaptations of his plays, and synopses of recent criticism. The
editors have also chosen essays that examine Friel's short fiction and his
association with the Field Day Company. The final two sections offer material of
particular interest to teachers. The first of these develops an approach to
teaching Friel with the World Wide Web. The last chapter collects Friel's own
opinions on his art and other topics. A useful index completes this companion.
The book belongs in collections that focus on 20th-century drama or support
programs in Irish Studies. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division
undergraduates and above. M. H. Kealy Immaculata University
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Ambrose
Bierce's "An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge": an annotated
critical edition /
Robert C. Evans, compiler and general editor ; Eric W. Atkins [and
others], editorial team.
[Translated from
Spanish]: "The original text used
is the critical annotated text compiled by Robert C. Evans, Professor at Auburn
University at Montgomery (Alabama). This version, which can be found at The
Ambrose Bierce Project site, is the result of years of university teaching and
collecting comments from some participating students in his courses. The
existence of that material online is extremely valuable, and allowed us easier
access to the deep reading that we wanted to put into practice with our
translation. By also offering our work online, we respond not only to the
original text of Bierce but also to the initiative of Professor Evans in what
can be read as an unusual example of inter-academic dialogue." - Incidente
en el puente de Owl Creek, by Ambrose Bierce -- Introducción Edición
bilingüe del texto a cargo de Juan Gabriel López Guix. Saltana, 3, 2009-2014
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
The American novel /
Robert C. Evans, general editor ; Deborah C. Solomon and Sarah
Fredericks, assistant editors.
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New
York : Facts On File, c2011.
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Choice Review
Taking a distinctive approach, Evans (Auburn Univ. at
Montgomery) presents a close examination of passages representing 150 great
American novels included in high school and college core curriculums. For
Evans, a "close reading" of chosen passages achieves a better
understanding of the novel. This two-volume set arranges entries alphabetically
by title of the work, including an overview, selected passages (leading novels
receive two to five passages), critical interpretation, and (somewhat
unnecessary) discussion questions. Generally 300 words in length, passages
include such literary gems as Holden Caulfield introducing himself in
Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Volumes lack biographies but provide a useful
introduction, brief bibliography, cross-references, and chronology. The
predictable author selection (e.g., Faulkner, Hemingway, and Twain) omits
Richard Ford, Reynolds Price, Joyce Carol Oates, and others. The majority of
entries are by literary scholar Evans. Solomon, a Florida State University PhD
candidate, contributed most of the entries on Henry James. Similar to Carl
Rollyson's edited Notable American Novelists (CH, Feb'08, 45-2940), which
features 140-plus essays on popular US and Canadian authors, this newer work
goes in a different direction with its engaging, rich-passage interpretation.
Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and general readers. S.
R. Curry University of Louisiana at Lafayette
+++++
Robert C. Evans’s two-volume The American Novel (Facts
on File) is a splendid, comprehensive teaching tool and seems reasonably priced
at $150. As the publisher describes them, the volumes contain “close readings
of selected passages from 150 great American novels, followed by analysis and
questions for discussion.” To be sure, I might again quibble around the fringe.
The project is organized idiosyncratically, not chronologically or
alphabetically by authors’ names but alphabetically by title (Faulkner’s
Absalom, Absalom! to Kingston’s The Woman Warrior), and it
occasionally stretches the definition of novel to include Maya Angelou’s autobiography I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and such novellas as Melville’s “Benito
Cereno” and Faulkner’s “The Bear.” Still, I am hard-pressed to find a single
canonical American novel that might be assigned to high schoolers or college
undergraduates that Evans ignores, and he discusses some novels often
challenged or even banned from classrooms (e.g., Huck Finn, To
Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye , and Lolita ).
- Gary Scharnhorst, American Literary Scholarship (2011).
+++++
The American Novel.
By Robert C. Evans.
2v. 2011. 976p. Facts On File, $150
(9780816076758); e-book, $150 (9781438134932).
813.007.
The way in which literature is studied has changed over the years.
Structuralism, cultural materialism, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and
postmodernism have had their moments in the English departments of colleges and
high schools. Although Facts On File’s new Understanding Literature
through Close Reading series hearkens back to the
mid-twentieth century by espousing the central elements of New Criticism, as
noted in the introduction to The American Novel (the first
title in the series), the skills necessary for close reading are still useful
and contribute to the success of other approaches. The 150 entries are arranged
alphabetically by novel title, and each
follows the same pattern. After a plot summary come several passages taken from
the work. Each passage is preceded by a paragraph providing context and
followed by an analysis using close-reading methods. Entries conclude with questions
for writing or discussion. Works were chosen because they are among those most
frequently taught and studied, and passages were chosen because they are well
known, crucial to the plot, well phrased, or representative. There are five
passages for Billy Budd, two for The Poisonwood Bible,
three for Death Comes to the Archbishop, and one for A
Separate Peace. Both volumes contain an alphabetical list of
the works covered and their authors. Volume 1 also has a
chronological list of the novels. There is no index. This would be a
useful and appropriate selection for a high-school or undergraduate library.
—Danise Hoover [Booklist]
YA/C: The novels that are covered here were chosen based, in part,
on how often they are taught and studied in high school. MEQ.
+++++
Six of Twain's best-known novels are skillfully summarized, quoted from, and analyzed in Understanding Literature Through Close Reading: The American Novel (2 vols.), ed. Robert C. Evans (Facts on File). The sensitive and respectful treatment of these works is unusually thorough for a reference work. --Alan Gribben, American Literary Scholarship, 2010
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Moby-Dick
/
editor, Robert C. Evans, Auburn University at Montgomery.
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Ipswich,
Massachusetts : Salem Press, a division of EBSCO Information Services, Inc. ;
Amenia, NY : Grey House Publishing, [2014]
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This eclectic, student-oriented volume includes
brief critical essays by numerous respected Melvilleans, including Mary K.
Bercaw Edwards on Melville’s experiences at sea and his immersion in the spoken
language of seafaring; Brian Yothers on the dominant trends in
interpreting Moby-Dick from the 1920s forward and, separately,
on religion in the novel; Jonathan Cook on reading Moby-Dick in
the context of the emergence of natural history; Jennifer Schell on the book’s
“fantasies of ecological abundance”; and Robert K. Wallace on the origin and
method of the impressively interdisciplinary “Moby-Dick and the
Arts” course he has taught for two decades at Northern Kentucky University. For
specialists, this last essay may be the most rewarding, as it provides a
template for how instructors can use Melville’s masterpiece to spark students’
own creative achievement. The volume also contains several essays by the book’s
editor, the best of which is a comparison of Joseph Hart’s 1834 popular whaling
novel Miriam Coffin to Moby-Dick. Evans lays out intriguing
parallels between the two books—prophecies, a digressive style, characters
named Starbuck who resist the hunt—and significant divergences, such as Miriam
Coffin’s pervasive racism and good-humored captain.
. . . The book’s clear,
straightforward style makes it a useful classroom complement to more densely
interpretive critical fare. - Dawn Coleman, Leviathan
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
LGBTQ
literature /
editor, Robert C. Evans.
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Published:
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Ipswich,
Massachusetts : Salem Press, a division of EBSCO Information Services, Inc. ;
Amenia, NY : Grey House Publishing, [2015]
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Edition:
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[First
edition].
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Choice Review
Evans
(English, Auburn Univ.) has assembled a comprehensive, accessible collection of
essays that, taken together, identify and reclaim homoerotic and homosocial
themes in literature (fiction, poetry, anthologies, personal essays);
demonstrate ways to interpret texts using a lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) perspective; and advocate fluid understandings
of gender and sexual desire. In the first two essays, Margaret Sönser Breen
examines LGBTQ literary works published before 1969 (pre-Stonewall riots) and
after 1969. The former tend to be characterized by indirect, veiled, and vague
references to LGBTQ themes and experiences; the latter are more frequently
characterized by LGBTQ pride, political activism, and visibility. Other essays
take up key LGBTQ issues--coming out of the closet, isolation, shame, secrecy,
cross-dressing, social norms about masculinity and femininity, speculations
about intimate, same-sex relationships--focusing on how these issues are
represented in the works of authors such as Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Leslie
Feinberg, Gloria Anzaldúa, Herman Melville, Angelina Weld Grimké, Mae V.
Cowdery, Constantine P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster, and Kate Bornstein. Some
contributors are less or not concerned about whether authors self-identified as
LGBTQ and instead highlight the importance of particular texts for LGBTQ
audiences and histories. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division
undergraduates; graduate students; general readers. --Tony E. Adams, Northeastern
Illinois University
+++++ Recommended
as one of the top 75 books for community college libraries for December 2015 by
Choice Reviews Online.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
The wit of seventeenth-century poetry /
edited by Claude J. Summers & Ted-Larry Pebworth.
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Columbia
: University of Missouri Press, c1995.
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Choice Review
Summers and Pebworth (both Univ. of Michigan-Dearborn) continue
their annual tradition of collecting some of the liveliest and most readable
essays on English Renaissance literature. The subject for this year's
collection, wit, is one of the great traditional subjects in the field, but it
is also a subject that has not attracted a great deal of postmodern
interest--perhaps because its discussion was so deeply connected to T.S. Eliot
and the emergence of high modernism. Interestingly, though some of these essays
make intermittent gestures toward postmodernism, the predominant approaches to
wit employed here are largely those that marked its discussion earlier in the
century: that is, literary history, history of ideas, and much excellent close
reading. It is thus a pleasure (and something of a surprise) to see such
diverse originality continuing to emerge not only from an old warhorse of a
topic but also from the old warhorses of the topic's traditional methodologies.
In all, this is a superb collection of well-written, well-argued, genuinely
readable essays, almost all of which will have something to say to both the
undergraduate and the specialist. P. Cullen; CUNY Graduate Center and College
of Staten Island
+++++
Robert C. Evans, “Wit
and the Power of Jonson’s Epigrammes,” in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry
Pebworth, ed. The Wit of Seventeenth-Century Poetry (1995),
pp. 101–18, considers the impact of Quintilian’s writings on Jonson’s repeated
use of the term “wit” in his Epigrammes, seeing in 24 of that
collection’s 133 poems a close association between the individual/social
power of wit and the power of engendering life. - Douglas Brooks, English
Literary Renaissance
+++++
R. C. Evans's essay . . . rightly emphasizes the centrality of Jonson's Epigrammes to the tradition of wit in English writing and their intrinsic value as a means of deciphering questions of 'personal, mental,linguistic, and social power' in his own poetry. - Michael G. Brennan, Notes and Queries
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
New perspectives on Ben Jonson /
edited by James Hirsh.
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Madison
[N.J.] : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ; c1997.
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Choice Review
For this presentation of diverse critical views, Hirsh (Georgia
State Univ. and no stranger to the English Renaissance) assembled essays that
focus on literary influence, theater practice, and issues in 16th-century life
without ignoring Jonson's pessimism and his moral stance. The collection
examines major works such as Volpone and Epicene and also suggests that some of
the author's neglected works deserve critical attention. The range of topics
and points of view invites discussion of Jonson's continuing importance and
offers insight into his complex personality. Hirsh's introductory essay gives
coherence to the volume. The style of the essays makes the work accessible to
most undergraduates; however, the specialized topics will be of greatest
benefit to upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. M. H.
Kealy; Immaculata College
+++++
[Evans] treats the topic of Jonson’s reading by
providing a list and summary of passages from Latin sources cited by
Lipsius in his Politica that were marked by Jonson in his copy
of that book; the latter looks more specifically at how Jonson’s reading of
Lipsius’ citations of Greek and Roman texts in his Politics influenced
Jonson’s Caroline politics. - Douglas Brooks, English Literary
Renaissance
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The Cambridge companion to Ben Jonson /
edited by Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart.
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Cambridge
[England] ; Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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Related Information:
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Choice Review
The 14 essays in this collection present a comprehensive view of
Jonson's life and career as poet, playwright, literary critic, and advocate and
practitioner of the sister arts. Jonson was a visual designer for illustrations
in books, including architectural and geometric configurations on title pages
and frontispieces, for scenic backdrops, and for costumes. He also oversaw
music and choreography for masques and entertainments. Consistent in the high
quality of its essays, this volume promotes many new views of Jonson while
summarizing previous commentary. At the same time, the contributors approach
their topics by situating Jonson in the intellectual climate, social
environment, cultural milieu, and politics from which his diverse works issued.
As such, this title, while serving as excellent literary history, more broadly
expounds a history of ideas, which will appeal to specialists in many
areas--sociology, theater arts, political science, and cultural, intellectual,
and art history. Uniformly well written, well researched, and persuasively
argued, this work is a necessary acquisition for all collections serving
upper-division undergraduates and above. A. C. Labriola Duquesne University
+++++
The Cambridge
Companion to Ben Jonson (Cambridge University Press, 2000, US $
59.95) is not the encyclopedia you might expect. It actually is
an anthology of authoritative and well-bibliographied short essays by
well-known Jonsonians Sara van den Berg, Martin Butler Leah H. Marcus, R.
V. Young, Richard Dutton, David Bevington, Richard Harp, Russ McDonald,
Ian Donaldson, Stephen Orgel, James A. Riddell, John Mulryan, Stanley Stewart,
and Robert C. Evans, edited by Harp & Stewart (who contribute
essays but oddly do not list themselves among the contributors). The book
is essential for all specialist collections. It likewise is useful in
underlining the fact that scholarship on
major Renaissance dramatists
does not have to be in the least unreadable or unreliable, faddish or foolish.
- L. R. N. Ashley, Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance
+++++
The entertaining final chapter, ‘Jonson’s critical heritage’ by
Robert C. Evans consists partly of a stock market report of the ups and downs
of Jonson’s reputation and partly a series of catalogues . . . . Some of these
catalogues contain forty or more items. This is an unusual and audacious
procedure for a scholarly essay, but I think it works here for two reasons.
First of all, it provides the most amount of information in the least amount of
space and will be useful as a reference tool, especially for undergraduates on
the hunt for paper topics. Secondly, it is a fitting way to end the collection
since there is something Jonsonian about these catalogues. – James Hirsh, Early
Theatre
+++++
Robert Evans offers a succinct and useful survey of both seventeenth-century and contemporary reception of Jonson's major comedies. - Jennifer Brady, Renaissance Quarterly
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
The
Shakespeare handbook /
edited by Andrew Hiscock and Stephen Longstaffe.
Robert C. Evans' annotated bibliography
judiciously selects and describes core studies old and new. - Joachim
Frenk, English Studies
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
The
seventeenth-century literature handbook /
edited by Robert C. Evans and Eric J. Sterling.
"At once
intellectually stimulating and genuinely useful, The Seventeenth-Century
Literature Handbook is an invaluable resource: a faithful and accessible guide
to the period's significant texts and literary approaches. Meticulously edited and
thoughtfully organized, the Handbook is suitable for beginning and advanced
students alike, offering both an introduction to the study of
seventeenth-century English literature and a sophisticated survey of key
concepts and contexts." - Claude J. Summers, William E. Stirton Professor
Emeritus, Humanities University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA
"The review of recent critical theory enables a refreshingly
new approach both to criticism and to an exemplary range of seventeenth-century
writing . . . By using a judicious mixture of established and more recent
critical approaches this collection provides a valuable challenge to accepted
views about canon and genre.' - Dr Peter Happé, Visiting Fellow, Department of
English, University of Southampton, UK” –
"Evans and Sterling, both of Auburn University, have produced not only a guide to British seventeenth-century literature, but also a handy reference to current trends in criticism. The book provides a timeline and an overview of the major historical events, primarily the Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration. This is followed by mini-biographies of some of the important writers along with literary and cultural movements, including the Royal Society, which, as Margaret Cavendish discovered, did not care what women thought. The handbook, however, notes recent work on women writers of the day as well as attitudes toward homosexuality and race. Essays explaining ways to read and analyze a work are excellent as is the explanation of the many ways to interpret one poem according to various literary theories. There is a glossary and solid biography for further research. The chapter on teaching the literature in the classroom is only available on line. The handbook is intended for use by teachers with sections to be used by students. However the articles on theory and analysis could be used in any literature class bewildered by the plethora of viewpoints on literary interpretation." -Eithne O'Leyne, BOOK NEWS, Inc.
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Culture
and society in Shakespeare's day /
Robert C. Evans.
From the three-volume Backgrounds to Shakespeare set,
this informative book looks at the social context of the playwright's times.
Divided into sections on daily life in the country, in London, and at court,
the discussion ranges widely, encompassing topics such as agriculture,
religion, housing, meals, dress, crime, travel, learning, government, and
royalty. Some readers may find the lengthy sentences challenging, but Evans
uses brackets to supply explanations of unfamiliar terms in the many
well-chosen quotes from the period. A short list of sources and recommended
reading appears at the end of each chapter, and a general bibliography is appended.
Illustrated in color with photos of sites as well as period portraits and
prints, this attractive volume offers a great deal of detailed information that
helps bring this fascinating period to life. —Carolyn Phelan [Booklist,
October 1, 2012]
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Review by: Helen Ostovich
Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Spring 2010), pp.
345-347
Robert C. Evans's “The
Politics (and Pairing) of Jonson's Country House Poems” is exemplary in the
exploration of the history of country-house poetry criticism, asking important
questions about the politics of peasant-lord relations, hospitality, and the
pastoral scene as a pleasant escape from the stresses of urban life. Evans
suggests that, instead of trying to place unequivocally the politics of the
poem as either reactionary, spiritual, or critical of social excess, we should
instead look at how Jonson meant the poem to be read — alongside his other
country-house poem in the first folio, “To Sir Robert Wroth”: “Reading the
poems as a linked pair may also help promote a fuller appreciation of the poem
to Wroth, which is usually overshadowed by (and largely ignored because of) its
better-known neighbour” (79). The indictment of Wroth's estate as an indictment
of the corrupt and powerful contrasts harshly with the personable host of
Penshurst. Evans argues that the same argument runs through both poems,
commenting on the same “catalogue of vice” with the same implications of “both
their real and . . . symbolic value” (85).
+++++
Robert C. Evans's discussion of the country-house poems ably shows
how the politics of the gift ‘provide a point of intersection between Jonson's
poetics of ethics and the material world he seeks to transcend’ (p. 4). The
paired poems,‘To Penshurst’ and ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’, ‘invite (almost demand)
political responses’; ‘Politics of some sort are almost impossible to ignore in
a discussion of these poems’ (p. 73). The poems complement one another to
promote ethical values highlighted in Jonson's relationship to the Sidney
circle.
Book Review
David Bevington
Ben Jonson and the
Politics of Genre, ed. A.D. Cousins and Alison V. Scott
English Historical
Review (2011) CXXVI (520):
690-691
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Perspectives
on World War I poetry /
Robert C. Evans
A timely contribution to
studies of the poetry of the First World War, Perspectives on World War
I Poetry is part of Bloomsbury’s multiple-genre ‘Great War’
collection, whose aim, in the centenary year of the outbreak of the First World
War, is to provide a ‘one-stop resource for those seeking to understand the
Great War and its impact’ (see: www.bloomsbury.com/ thegreatwar). As the book’s
preface sets out, its aims are primarily pedagogical and equalizing: to bring
to the foreground of the study of the poetry of the First World War numerous
relevant literary theories, while also dispelling the notion that literary
theory is difficult or daunting. Many so-called ‘simple’ introductions to the
study of literature through literary theory confuse rather than clarify through
their attempts at simplification or accessibility, but Evans’s study, perhaps
because he chooses a specific literary focus for the theoretical exposition, is
not one of these.
Book reviews: Perspectives
on World War I Poetry by Robert C. Evans. Heather H. Yeung.
Transnational Literature Vol. 7 No. 1, November 2014.
http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html
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An initial thought in
appraising this book is a consideration of whether it is appropriate to have a
historian’s perspective, especially as the book is overtly concentrated on
various aspects of literary criticism. However, one of the strengths of Robert
C. Evans’s book is in promoting the concept that literature cannot exist in a
bubble, and the combination of literature and history offered here quickly
confounds the view that only a literary viewpoint is appropriate in assessing
this work. . . . In general the description of critical approaches is sound,
providing some interesting perspectives on the poetry. It allows students to
consider the various critical methods and their validity in both time and
philosophy. . . . In Chapter 12 , ‘The Kinds of Questions Different Critics
Ask’ (p. 203), the descriptions are a useful aide-mémoire for students. In
exploring its central theme through the close reading of reproduced poems, the
book acts as both an anthology and a review of critical approaches. This
methodology could usefully be applied to the poetry and wider literatures of
other periods and cultures. Speaking to the present interest and increasing body
of work generated as a result of the centenary of the First World War, this
book may find a popular audience but is also an interesting addition to
academic criticism. - Modern Language Review
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Moby-Dick
/
editor, Robert C. Evans, Auburn University at Montgomery.
This eclectic,
student-oriented volume includes brief critical essays by numerous respected
Melvilleans, including Mary K. Bercaw Edwards on Melville’s experiences at sea
and his immersion in the spoken language of seafaring; Brian Yothers on the
dominant trends in interpreting Moby-Dick from the 1920s forward and,
separately, on religion in the novel; Jonathan Cook on reading Moby-Dick in the
context of the emergence of natural history; Jennifer Schell on the book’s
“fantasies of ecological abundance”; and Robert K. Wallace on the origin and
method of the impressively interdisciplinary “Moby-Dick and the Arts” course he
has taught for two decades at Northern Kentucky University. For specialists,
this last essay may be the most rewarding, as it provides a template for how
instructors can use Melville’s masterpiece to spark students’ own creative
achievement. The volume also contains several essays by the book’s editor, the
best of which is a comparison of Joseph Hart’s 1834 popular whaling novel
Miriam Coffin to Moby-Dick. Evans lays out intriguing parallels between the two
books—prophecies, a digressive style, characters named Starbuck who resist the
hunt—and significant divergences, such as Miriam Coffin’s pervasive racism and
good-humored captain. . . . The book’s clear, straightforward style makes it a
useful classroom complement to more densely interpretive critical fare. - Dawn
Coleman, Leviathan
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Othello
: a critical reader /
Robert C. Evans.
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Published:
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London
: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc,
2015.
A "competent, classroom-ready" guide featuring "valuable new criticism." -- Studies in English Literature |
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Perspectives
on Renaissance poetry /
Robert C. Evans.
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Author:
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Published:
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London
; New Delhi ; New York ; Sydney : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2015.
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Topics:
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Choice Review
This primer in applied critical theory bridges the gap between
early modern English poetry and various analytical approaches to literature. It
is more focused than other introductory guides to criticism, such as Wilfred
Guerin's Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature (1966; 2nd.,
1979) and Charles Bressler's Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory
and Practice. Evans (English and philosophy, Auburn Univ., Montgomery)
offers paragraph-length summaries of 20 critical methodologies and
demonstrates, in chapter-length discussions, how they elucidate some 30
Renaissance poems by writers from Wyatt to Milton (included are several poems
by Emilia Lanier, Anne Vaughn Lock, and Lady Mary Wroth). Evans's style is
direct and accessible but never simplistic. Not every method is applied to
every text (one misses a psychoanalytic reading of Donne's "Flea" and
"Holy Sonnet 14"), but Evans succeeds in showing how early modern
texts might respond to a variety of reading approaches. Specialists may find
the book's design somewhat schematic, but the intended audience (less
experienced readers) will welcome Evans's concise yet careful distinctions
among a variety of potentially challenging, theoretical strategies. Supplementary
materials by Anne Kemp and Christina Garner offer useful additional examples of
explication and a taxonomy of critical methods. Summing Up: Highly recommended.
Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students; general readers.
--Christopher Baker, Armstrong State University
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