The English Renaissance : identity and representation in Elizabethan England / Alistair Fox.

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The Reception of Italian Literary Culture: Motives and Dynamics -- Wyatt, Surrey and the Onset of English Petrarchism -- Elizabethan Petrarchism and the Protestant Location of Self -- Ethic and Politic Considerations: Spenser, Sidney and the Uses of Italianate Pastoral -- Epic and the Formation of National Identity: Ariosto, Tasso and The Faerie Queene -- Appraising 'the Seeming Truths' of the Times: the Italianate Plays of Shakespeare.

This book reassesses Renaissance English literature and its place in Elizabethan society. It examines, in particular, the role of Italianate literary imitation in addressing the ethical and political issues of the sixteenth century. In doing so, it reveals the significance of the Calvinist discourse of English Protestantism as a stimulus to literary creation.

It demonstrates how the clash between the values of the Continental system from which England was separating and the assumptions of the Elizabethan religious Settlement of 1559 prompted writers to use creative imitation as a means of exploring the problematical relationship between the two.

The author shows how imitation of Italianate literary culture had a much greater influence on the formation of modern English identity than has been hitherto supposed. He demonstrates that it also invested Renaissance English literature with many of its most characteristic attributes. Above all, the English Renaissance and Reformation are shown to be far more closely linked than previous scholars have recognized.