Your purchase has been completed. Your documents are now available to view.
Changing the currency will empty your shopping cart.
In Untold Futures, J. K. Barret locates models for recovering the variety of futures imagined within some of our most foundational literature. These poems, plays, and prose fictions reveal how Renaissance writers embraced uncertain potential to think about their own present moment and their own place in time. The history of the future that Barret reconstructs looks beyond futures implicitly dismissed as impossible or aftertimes defined by inevitability and fixed perspective. Chapters on Philip Sidney's Old Arcadia, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost trace instead a persistent interest in an indeterminate, earthly future evident in literary constructions that foreground anticipation and expectation.Barret argues that the temporal perspectives embedded in these literary texts unsettle some of our most familiar points of reference for the period by highlighting an emerging cultural self-consciousness capable of registering earthly futures predicated on the continued sameness of time rather than radical ruptures in it. Rather than mapping a particular future, these writers generate imaginative access to a range of futures. Barret makes a strong case for the role of language itself in emerging conceptualizations of temporality.
J. K. Barret is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.
"Untold Futures is marvelous, both erudite and clever, and also contains beautiful writing. It offers an important new perspective on early modern historiography. Diverging from nearly all other studies of Renaissance conceptions of time, J. K. Barret uncovers a persistent interest in the earthly future (with all of its uncertainties) in some of the most important texts in the canon of Renaissance literature."
Jesse M. Lander, University of Notre Dame, author of Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England:
"In Untold Futures, J. K. Barret provides a fluent account of a fascinating topic. The question of temporality and its relationship to Renaissance literature is compelling, and Barret writes engagingly, providing illuminating, supple, and sophisticated readings of a variety of texts."
Michael Schoenfeldt, John Knott Professor of English Literature, University of Michigan, author of Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England:
"Untold Futures is one of those rare books that will make an entire field view familiar material in a new and profound light. In prose that is at once agile and rigorous, J. K. Barret shrewdly reminds us that this period named the Renaissance is not just involved in the rediscovery of classical antiquity, but also in the effort to imagine possibilities for the future."
Sarah Lewis, King's College London:
"Untold Futures offers persuasive close analysis of the literary techniques and devices through which Barret suggests these writers were constantly 'capturing, pacing, arranging and reimagining linear time' (9)... [T]he future is destabilized, overdetermined, and ultimately, 'reliably, even permanently, ephemeral' in Untold Futures (179). This book succeeds in making us question not only the fixity of future times, but the very terms we use to describe this period in history itself."
Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product.
