Major tudor authors

Аннотация

In the late 1970s, sitting in his mother’s home in Dallas, I asked my old friend, the meticulous and inventive scholar Norman Grabo, point-blank, ‘‘What book would you like to beat?’’ He said without pause, ‘‘English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, excluding Drama,’’ and I laughed because I had the same book in mind. I think my laughter and surprise convinced him I was not lying. C. S. Lewis’ book, commissioned for Oxford out of the Clark Lectures, may have had the dullest title, but it was an allegro, brilliant, opinionated, erudite last-ditch effort to hold up the romantic notion of genius in the face of a groundswell of materialist rejection of any notion of the kind of human freedom that might allow new simple ideas and original works of art to exist.