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“... texts. Monumental without being mausolean, this latest Norton enables readers to engage in what Stephen Greenblatt has elsewhere called ‘speaking with the dead’ – not only the proverbial dead white males, but a good many ...”

“... Last May Stephen Greenblatt, who was then president of the Modern Languages Association, the literary academic’s equivalent of the Teamsters, circulated a letter among its twenty thousand or so members. ‘Over the last few decades,’ he wrote, ‘most departments of language and literature have come to demand that junior faculty members produce, as a condition for being seriously considered for promotion to tenure, a full-length book published by a reputable press ...”

“... for Vickers, are an impressively varied range of flourishing Shakespeareans – from Stephen Greenblatt to Stanley Cavell, Lynda Boose to Robert Weimann – who are catalogued and castigated, chapter by chapter, under the usual demonised labels: as deconstructionists, New Historicists, psychoanalytic critics, feminists and Marxists (who ...”

“... of publishing poetry and the problems of patronage. This is in accordance with the quotation from Stephen Greenblatt which Williams starts with, that works of art and literature are ‘social actions ... embedded in systems of public signification’; which may seem limiting. In fact, the chapter is very worthwhile, and certainly a lot more fun than ...”

“... It is still often proposed that religion and science need not conflict. Stephen Jay Gould held that they occupy ‘non-overlapping magisteria’: science deals with questions of fact, religion with questions of value and meaning. This is wishful thinking, because religions base themselves on factual claims. The god Yahweh promised the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants; Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from golden plates received from the angel Moroni; Jesus of Nazareth is seated at the right hand of the Father, and will return to judge the living and the dead ...”

“... such a transparent near-hoax, but that, they should have bothered with international law at all. Stephen Greenblatt, in Marvellous Possessions, makes a similar suggestion about Columbus’s remark that he was not contradicted – ‘y no me fué contradicho’ – when he took possession of a series of Caribbean islands in the name of the Spanish ...”

“... a year. There are three appropriately distinguished candidates standing for the post this year: Stephen Greenblatt, Sandra Gilbert and Marjorie Perloff. Their policy declarations make interesting reading. Each accepts there is a crisis – although they disagree as to whether the crisis lies within or outside the profession. ...”

“... were made use of as vehicles of fulsome adulation to tyranny and oppression.’ This sounds like Stephen Orgel or Stephen Greenblatt arguing that Renaissance plays – especially court-masque-influenced ones such as The Tempest – were bound up with the display and ‘inscription’ of monarchical power. In fact, it ...”

“... sculpture. Often this is achieved by means of a rhetoric of wonder and astonishment which, as Stephen Greenblatt has observed of travellers in the New World, is invoked at precisely those occasions when things begin to look uncomfortably familiar. Knox cites and dismisses an example which tries to prove that there is no concept of ‘the mind’ in ...”

“... as they are embodied in plays and poems will need to read her book, for in it we encounter what Stephen Greenblatt has called ‘the touch of the ...”

“... new thing as a mere cover for a revived academic Marxism. There is an able and fastidious piece by Stephen Greenblatt, a pioneer of the style, but the shrewdest essay is Hayden White’s survey of the whole collection. White considers this new style of doing history from the point of view of a professional philosopher of history, or metahistorian. He ...”

“... representative in literature, of a time, a milieu, a genre, a creative kin-group – towards what Stephen Greenblatt, contributor here of a fascinating little piece on the textuality of death in the 16th century, calls ‘cultural poetics’. This giant volume has, however, nearly as many different contributors as there are chapters and they follow no ...”

“... more than we can contain it.’ This is distinctly unfashionable rhetoric. A New Historicist like Stephen Greenblatt would teach us that Shakespeare’s plays are embedded in their moment, and that they ‘circulate’ energies and forms alive throughout Elizabethan culture. In Greenblatt’s view, the plays are ...”

“... has at times analysed wonder – notably in relation to exploration and discovery, as in Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvellous Possessions – but has more pervasively and implicitly celebrated it and capitalised on it, offering up Renaissance England for the bedazzlement of American graduate students as itself a cabinet of wonderful ...”

“... A. Cohen ‘by and large appalling tosh’; the critical practice of Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt is, he says, ‘piss-poor’, while the former is so inaccurate (not that Cunningham is without his blunders) that she gives us ‘history as shitty-slop’. Yet he wants readers to be tactful as well as tactile, which means having what ...”