Over the past two decades there has been a perceived paradigm shift in the study of English Renaissance literature. Scholarly attention has moved from the individual to the social as the agent of literary production and the principal site of discussion. Genius is now far less likely to be invoked than discourse, culture, or ideology. The intellectual shift, routinely associated with new historicism, feminism, and cultural materialism, has been neither uncontested nor simple and uniform.

The essays in the present volume set out to identify, examine, and respond to these discontinuities, and in so doing attest to the extraordinary vitality of contemporary Renaissance studies.